That changed this morning, when I decided to be a bit more patient. Previously I'd gotten fed up of staring at a black screen after a couple of minutes and closed the client but today I tabbed out and looked at some other stuff until finally the blackness cleared to reveal an image of what looked uncannily like a Scotsman in a kilt, staring at a UFO.
After a considerably longer period, during which I had to go make an account and then wait for the game to sort itself out some more, I eventually arrived at character creation, where I spent a much shorter time making a character I thought I wouldn't mind looking at for the few minutes I imagined I'd be spending there.
Two and a half hours later I logged out. I'd probably be there still, if I hadn't had real life stuff to do. I still don't know whether there's an NDA but on the grounds that there are a handful of videos about the test up on YouTube and because I always figure no-one is really going to get too upset if you're saying nice things, I thought I'd share a few pictures and chat a little about what I did.
This isn't going to be a review or even a First impressions piece. I'm mostly going to talk about the sole reason I applied to join the playtest in the first place: AI Text-to-3D Asset Generation. That's what the developers call it. It means you can type a description of anything you'd like to have into a field in the UI and the game will generate it for you.
It works, too. After a fashion. But we'll get to that. First, I probably ought to remind you why the name Dreamworld might sound familiar. There was a big hoo-hah about it a couple of years back, when a bunch of high profile streamers and vloggers including Asmongold and Josh Strife Hayes did pieces about it being a scam.
I'm not going to go over that or even link to any of the discussions or accusations. It's all there in the public record if you're interested. I'm not, particularly. I only vaguely remember the fuss and I don't have any desire to go dig up whatever passed for facts back then. All I can say is the game exists, it's on Steam, you can play it for free if you ask for an invite and it's quite interesting when you get to see it in action.
It's not much to look at and it lurches and lags on my system, which meets the minimum specs, but it does run and in two and a half hours I didn't encounter any bugs, nor did I get disconnected, which doesn't seem too shabby for an alpha.
The game offers the option of using controls that feel "Like Minecraft" or "Like Valheim" so obviously I chose the latter. The action begins yet another of those "Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space" scenarios, where you fall through a void and eventually land in front of what turns out to be the starting city.
From there on it's a typical tutorial and quite a good one, too. It goes through all kinds of things at a steady pace, in a comprehensible fashion. with clear explanations and solid documentation. After talking to several NPCs and doing their tasks I knew how to build, craft, fight, farm and travel.
Of course, what I really wanted to do was play with the item generator but that comes later. Although not that much later, fortunately. Somewhere about the time one of the NPCs gives you a quest to go kill goblins in a burrow and warns you you to take some friends, in fact. Because, yes, in case you'd forgotten, which had, this is a full-on MMORPG or wants to be.
I think I might have had some problems finding a group, had I actually wanted to go check out those goblin burrows. I saw plenty of evidence that other people had been playing - holes dug in the ground, houses half-built - but I didn't see another player in my time there.
I assume this is purely an alpha thing but at the moment you can make just about everything with wood, even stone buildings. While that may be unrealistically it's also extremely convenient, meaning all I had to do was keep chopping down trees to make anything I wanted.
And you can make a lot, even before you start petitioning an LLM to design you new stuff. There are plenty of recipes, some of which you start with and some which just seem to pop up in your Asset Catalog as you do other things, like gather flowers or loot chests.
I spent far longer than I should have, constructing a country cottage. I don't believe you can even stay for long on the tutorial island (Which would explain why I didn't see anyone there, I guess.) so there's not much point putting a lot of time and effort into building your dream home. But building is just such fun...
As soon as I had the roof on (The forge needs cover to operate.) I placed my Dreamforge, the crafting station that makes your dreams come true, provided your dreams are limited to static objects that can be succinctly summed-up in a few descriptive phrases, that is. Then I had to think of something to make.
You know how it is, when someone asks you what you want for your birthday and you suddenly can't think of anything at all? It was like that. I played AD&D with someone once who, when he was offered a Limited Wish by a powerful entity, could only think of "a fur coat". Which is what he got. I asked for a magic weapon suitable for a ranger and I got a +2 flaming longsword that served me well for the rest of the campaign. Just saying.
Where was I? Oh yes. Trying to come up with something to have the Dreamforge make for me. For some reason I asked for a pergola with roses and butterflies. The things that come into your head, eh?
The forge receives your instructions then tells you it'll take a while and to come back later. I wasn't sure if that meant five minutes or tomorrow but it turned out not to take long at all.
Currently you're limited to five generations per day. I had four left and I wasn't expecting much from any of them but my cynicism was to be overturned on my very next attempt, when I decided to stop trying to think of something appropriate and just go with what was on my mind. Lana del Rey, obviously. It always is.
As you can see, it doesn't hang well on the plaster and lathe wall I had up at the time. It hangs much better on the stone walls, now I've rebuilt, but I didn't take a screenshot of that, unfortunately. It's also a bas relief, which I didn't ask for but which I very much like.
Following that success I thought I'd go for something bigger - like a car. I have a T-shirt with a cartoon Lana driving an open top sports car, which is almost certainly why my next thought was "A full-size red Corvette convertible".
I don't know enough about cars to say whether or not what I got was a corvette but I sure as hell can tell you it ain't full size. It might just about fit a toddler, I guess.
Of course, even if the car had been life-size, I still couldn't have driven anywhere in it. The forge just makes furniture, basically. So since that's what it's good at I asked it to make me a rug. I asked for a large, shag-pile tiger skin rug and I got... a doormat. One thing the forge does not seem to be good at is dimensions.
That left me with just one generation for the day. What does every home need? That's right. A dog!
Remember when I said the forge doesn't do well with sizes? So far, that's meant big things coming out too small but it works the other way, too. I asked for a small black and white dog wearing a red bandana around its neck. I got everything but small.
I don't really know where the people behind Dreamworld think they're going with the game. It's clunky and awkward and clearly a lot of people haven't had much confidence in the project up to now. Like Story Crafter that I talked about yesterday, though, it's not hard to see the potential.
Whether small, indie teams like these are going to have the resources to realize that potential seems to me to be quite unlikely. But someone will. Count on it.
Until that happens, Dreamworld is a lot of fun to play around with. I don't know how much longer the current test is set to run but I hope to get some more time with it before it disappears behind the curtain again.
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