Tip Your Guards, I'm Here All Weekend

I don't have a lot to say about Monsters & Memories that I haven't said before but I'm not going to let that stop me. The retro-MMORPG from Niche Worlds Cult is open to all for the weekend, an opportunity I strongly recommend taking advantage of, should you have any interest or curiosity in either the specific project itself or the general proposition of games that seek to go back to the supposed golden days of 1999-2004.

Just one warning: if you are thinking of taking a look, make sure you set aside plenty of time. This is not one of those games you can drop into for half an hour to get its measure. It's OG EverQuest with better graphics and it's making very few compromises towards modernity.

That makes it sound more trying than it is. It's both fun and compelling, provided you know what you're getting yourself into. If you missed out on the "classic" MMORPG experience the first time round and haven't already taken one of the many, many opportunities to see for yourself what all the fuss was about (Just how many attempts to re-invent the MMO wheel have there been, now?) then this is definitely your moment.

Of all the games of its kind I've tried, I find M&M by some margin the most convincing. It doesn't try to fudge the deal with the kind of quality of life improvements pretty much every MMORPG since World of Warcraft have considered essential and yet it somehow still manages to be both accessible and less frustrating than its source material.

For example, there's no map. Not just no mini-map, a line plenty of would-be old school games choose not to cross; in Monsters & Memories, there's no map at all. There's not even a compass. If you want to know how to get from the harbor to the West Gate you either learn the route and remember the landmarks or you figure out where the sun is and orient yourself by that.

Pretty When You Die

I already knew the drill from my several previous visits and I'm pleased to say that I did at least spend considerably less time last night, wandering aimlessly around, hopelessly lost in the surprisingly large and complex starting city. That's not to say it didn't take me a good while, all the same. Or that I didn't end up swimming around the walls of the city from the docks because I couldn't find a route through the town that took me where I wanted to go.

Luckily for my character, she was in her underwear by then, so she didn't get her clothes wet. Everything she owned except her skivvies were still on her corpse, somewhere in the desert a few hundred yards outside the West Gate. I'd made the mistake of attacking a Fire Beetle. Not a good idea at Level One as it turns out.

I'd thought I might lose that fight but I wasn't that bothered because I could see the West Gate from where I was standing. I knew it would only take me a few moments to run back and reclaim my stuff. 

Except it turned out my character wasn't bound at the West Gate, even though I'm pretty sure that's where she spawned in. She was bound at the North Gate. It took me about twenty minutes to get back. After I realized I was looking for my corpse at the wrong gate, that is. Call it half an hour altogether.

By then I'd been playing for about ninety minutes. I spent a couple of hours in the game, including making a new character. There was no trace of any of my earlier ones, which was hardly a surprise, given the game still in fairly early testing.

You might not think it would take long to make a character, given how very few appearance options there are, but any time saved by not having to play around with sliders for eyebrow width or chin depth is easily lost as you read the details of numerous class and race options, pick your major and minor perks, adjust your stats and finally choose a deity. 

Not the god I chose.

That last part took longer than it might have because all the gods you can worship in the game are currently represented by what I assume is placeholder art - pictures of cats and dogs. If that's actually what they look like, it must be a very interesting pantheon...

In previous tests I went for an Elementalist, which is basically an EQ Magician, but this time I chose to be a Spellblade, a class I'm fairly sure doesn't have an exact analog in original EQ. I didn't exactly know what it was, if I'm honest. I just thought it sounded cool.

And I guess it might be if you get to play one past Level One. I couldn't tell you. I didn't get that far but as far as I did get, there certainly wasn't anything cool about mine.

Things started very well. Because I've played in previous tests but mostly because I still remember how we played EverQuest back in the day, I knew to open my inventory and read the note introducing me to my Guildmaster. Absolutely nothing in the game tells you to do that. Absolutely nothing in the game tells you to do anything. It expects you either to know or to figure it out for yourself.

Okay, that's not entirely fair. There is an option in the UI that sends you to a web-page with some advice for new players but I'm not sure that technically counts as "in-game" information.

As it happens, Spellblades share a Guildhouse with Elementalists and I remembered where that was. Also, it's a frickin' great tower you can see from all over the city, so it's hard to miss. I got there faster than usual and even more unexpectedly found my way almost immediately to the top, where my Guildmaster was waiting. It helped that there are teleports now and it helped even more that they look and work exactly like the ones in Erudin.

Jaffar's advice on where to find my trainer: "You probably passed him on the way up."

My Guildmaster was pleased to see me but he was far too important to do any more than wlecome me to the Guild and send me off to see someone else. That, right there, is emblematic of what to expect in the game. Imagine it from the perspective of a total newbie:

You log in with no idea where you are or what you're supposed to do. If, by blind luck or, more likely, by begging pathetically for help in General Chat, you find the note in your bag and figure out how to read it (Not by any means a given.) then you have to search the unfeasibly huge city for some NPC who turns out to be right at the very top of a tower, whose upper levels can only be accessed by teleporters with no obvious or intuitive means operation. And when you finally get to him, the bastard just nods at you and sends you off to see someone else!

Someone else who, I might add, was harder to find than the first guy. It took me ten minutes to work out where he was hiding and even then it was mostly luck. When I spoke to him he gave me a bag and told me to go fill it with bones from the undead that wander about just outside the gates. Six bones, please, no fewer. And don't bother bringing back any that aren't singed from the spell you're going to cast on your weapon. You know how to do that, right? No? Well, I'm sure you'll figure it out.

An hour later I had one bone and I was lucky to have that. It wasn't because the skeletons were too tough or because I couldn't find where they lurked or any of the usual reasons. It was because the average unlife expectancy of a rotting skeleton last night was about one and a half seconds. I saw quite a few but I only ever managed to get to one of them before someone else killed it.

See that Fire Beetle behind me? Bet I could take him!

I was on the US East Coast server and it was heaving. There were players everywhere and General chat scrolled endlessly, filled with the kind of questions and commentary that suggested everyone involved was a veteran of many similar experiences. Once in a while, someone would say something that marked them out as an initiate to the type of gameplay involved but almost everyone knew the ropes, They just wanted to query some specific detail of how this particular diku-mud variant differed from whichever  they were already familiar with.

Even though I must have done it before, it took me a ridiculous amount of time to figure out how to scribe my special attack. I didn't have any trouble scribing my spell scrolls (Both of them.) so I was able to set my weapon on fire like a good Spellblade should and to cast a very small nuke about once every ten seconds. I also figured out, by opening the options and reading the keybinds, that "Q" turned on auto-attack. The scrolls in my pack for Taunt and whatever the attack was called, though? They were still there.

I didn't worry about it too much. Even without my special attack, how hard could it be to kill a bat? I couldn't find any undead so I thought I might as well kill something. 

Too hard for me, that's how hard it was. I couldn't put a dent in the flappy pest's health bar but he had no trouble chewing through mine at an alarming rate, so I ran. I tried running to the guards but they did nothing, which wasn't a surprise. People had been complaining about their fecklessness in chat all night.

I was faster than the bat, anyway, so I thought I'd just keep running until the creature leashed and left me alone. Only it seems M&M models itself on the era of EQ when mobs didn't leash. When they chased you to the zone line and stayed there, waiting, just in case you came back. 

It's that way, isn't it? I'm sure it's that way...

Eventually I gave in to the inevitable and turned to fight. It seemed like letting it kill me was the only way I was going to get the damn thing off my back. I was at about 10% health and flat out of mana, with the bat still very much fighting fit, when a passing player spotted I was in some difficulty and casually swatted the bat out of the sky as he passed. I thanked him and sat down to get my health back.

By then I was far into the city and lost all over again, which is how I ended up going out of the West Gate. It just happened to be nearest, although at the time I thought it was the one I'd come in through, which it wasn't. Probably. Honestly, who knows? The damn city's a maze and who can keep track when they're being chased by a rabid bat?

Since fighting with just one spell and auto-attack was clearly untenable, I sat down to read through some of the New Player advice on the website, which was how I finally figured out how to scribe the combat scrolls, which needed to go into a different page of my book to the spells. I thought I'd already tried that and it hadn't worked. Maybe I had. There was some lag around. I might well have given up, thinking nothing was happening, while the server was still struggling to do what I'd asked.

I thought I'd  give Spellblading another try, with a proper attack and all my mana, which is how I came to attack that Fire Beetle. To my credit, I did get the creature to about half health but once again there was no possible way I was going to win. Still, as I said earlier, I could see the gate from where I was, so it seemed like a good idea just to let the thing kill me, then run back for my stuff.

Well, we already know how that turned out. When it first happens to you, be aware there's no marker on the map to show you where to go, for the very good reason that, as mentioned earlier, there's no map. You need to note some landmark or other when you die or you'll be a long time looking. I imagine there are ways and means to locate a corpse but none that a level One character has access to, I think.

I did eventually find my corpse but I was dehydrated and starving by then because eating and drinking is a thing in the game and when you die everything stays on your corpse including all your food and drink. And your clothes. And your weapons. 

Sun's coming up so that must be East.

On the bright side, at the moment at least, being parched and hungry doesn't seem to impact gameplay much, if at all. I couldn't see any difference. It certainly didn't affect my stamina for swimming half way round the bay.

After I got my stuff back, I worked out where the skeletons spawned and managed to kill one before I got chased back to the gates by an angry gnoll. The guard actually dealt with that one, leading me to suspect that, as in some cities in EQ, guards only attack mobs that are innately aggressive, leaving you to deal with any wildlife you unwisely provoke.

I would have gone back to try for another skeleton but by then the lag was really kicking in and I got disconnected so I decided to call it a night. At no point was I not having fun, even when i was searching for my corpse. Even though in two hours I got pretty much nothing done and hadn't even made it to halfway through Level One, I felt I'd had a pretty good time.

Compare that with my brief exposure to Pantheon, in which I played for about as long and was bored almost the whole time. On paper, they're nearly the same game but in practice Monsters & Memories is a sunny afternoon messing around with your pals down the rec, while Pantheon is compulsory games at school under a grey sky with rain threatening. Probably not fair to Pantheon but definitely the impression I've been left with after trying the pair of them.

The last thing to mention is how unreasonably lovely Monster & Memories looks. The graphics are very simple and old-fashioned but they just glow with love and attention. Everything looks right, somehow and much more attractive than it should. I think the really excellent lighting has a lot to do with it. The sky-box is extremely impressive, day and night, as many people kept pointing out in chat.

The open test is on all weekend. I'll be going back for more. I'm hoping some people will have leveled up a bit and moved out of the starting area so I can get the five bones I need. 

I hope it's 100% drop rate...