A Tiny Bit Of Bitcraft, Bitten Off, Chewed Over, Then Spat Out

When I wrote about Crystal of Atlan yesterday, I certainly wasn't expecting to be writing another First impressions piece about a different game today. And I'm not going to, not really. I am going to say something about Bitcraft though.

Bitcraft is "a true single-world MMORPG" according to its Steam Store Page, which goes on to describe it as a highly social game in which "you’ll foster deep social connections and find endless opportunities for collaboration", so you can see why, although I've known about it for a good while, I haven't mentioned it before or paid much attention to it. All I knew about the game until today was what I'd read in a few news items and a maybe a couple of paragraphs in blogs. I think Tipa might have said something about it once...

Well, now I have the deep insight into the game that comes from having spent almost three-quarters of an hour playing it. It would have been longer but the game is suffering from massive overcrowding, server lag and memory leaks right now and the forty-three minute mark was when my PC gave up and shut it down.

I woke up in a field? What was I drinking last night? 

That short exposure was enough to tell me pretty much all I needed to know, though. It's handy that I played Crystal of Atlan yesterday. It gives me a great benchmark for picking up a new game that I didn't know anything about and giving it a go. It also makes for a fine illustration of the contrast between supposedly soulless, high-gloss, mass-market product and scrappy-but-heartfelt indie niche efforts.

Here's the key difference, as filtered through my tastes and preferences: ever since I logged out of Crystal of Atlan I've been thinking about logging back in and playing some more because it was fun. Even as I was playing Bitcraft and the game was obviously about to crash, I was hoping it would so I could stop playing and go do something more enjoyable instead.

Crystal of Atlan was fun from the start. Bitcraft might get to be fun at some point but it was very obvious it was going to take a long time and a lot of work before anything like that happened. I get that, for lots of people, what I'm labeling "work" is the fun but I am very clearly not one of those people. I might have been once but not any more.

It's not much but it's... okay, it's just not much.

I don't want to rag on Bitcraft. It's very easy to see the appeal and I would guess that, of its genre, it's likely to be one of the better examples. It certainly looks good. Excellent, in fact. The graphics are highly stylized and quite lovely. The UI design is especially well-done, with a book-like aesthetic that manages to be both attractive to look at and comfortable to use.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about the controls, which are some of the worst I've had to deal with since Final Fantasy XI.  There was some minor discussion of this in chat while I was playing, although as is common with crafting-oriented games still in testing, there was a good deal of sitting happily inside the silo while chugging the Kool-Aid. Several people referenced Runescape as an explanation of why the controls are as they are but I've played Runescape and I don't recall having anything like this amount of difficulty getting my character to do what I wanted. It's just bad design.

As soon as I got into the game almost literally the first thing I did was to go into Settings and change a bunch of things. The game uses Click-to-Move and Follow-the-Pointer for movement, which is fine. Lots of games do. To look around you, though, you have to use the Arrow keys. Who uses the arrow keys? I haven't used them since EverQuest more than two decades ago. I forgot they were even there!

The camoflage look is in again this year.

Just use mouselook then, you might well say. If only! Bitcraft uses the extremely annoying Middle Mouse Button for that. Not the first game to do so but it never gets any better. I find holding down a small, hard button indefinitely with the tip of my finger is both awkward and uncomfortable. I drive characters using mouselook continously in most games, as I imagine do many players, and having this constant pressure, verging on discomfort, in my right index finger is not conducive to a good time.

Sprint, usually bound to Left Shift in most games I've played, is here bound to Space. What's Jump bound to then, you might be wondering. Nothing. You can't jump. You can climb, though. And "Fast Climb",  too. That's what Left Shift does.

Care to show me your manoeuver,
Heimlich?

As for interacting with the environment, that's on "Q".  Which is an idiosyncratic choice, to be polite about it, but I guess it might have some validity if the game also used WASD for movement. It does not. 

There were other, similar issues. Before I even attempted to move my character from the spot in the middle of a vast field of grass where she'd woken up, I changed all of the above keybinds to something that suited me better. Credit to Bitcraft for having fully rebindable keys, albeit with too many warnings and confirmations to get the job done. (Also for having a simple screenshot option that removes the UI.)

Unfortunately - that word again - a few minutes later I had to change them all back. There's a little Wisp that pops up and takes you through the basics in an extended tutorial. He's chatty and I quite liked him. I was happy to follow his instructions. Only, whenever he tried to show me how to do something, like sprint for example, he couldn't tell I'd done it if I'd changed the keybind. I had to reset everything to default just to get him to move on to the next instruction.

You might notice I seem to have skipped character creation. That's because we haven't gotten to it yet. It takes place inside the game, after you meet the Wisp. He shows you how to open your Vault, which is where you keep your appearance gear, not that you have any yet, and your hairstyles, skin color and masks. Which would be weird if you were human but you're not. You're some kind of automata.

There's lore about that, which forms part of the narrative of the game, I think, but for now let's just say your character is a kind of animated tailor's dummy, dressed in rags. Quite cute, actually. There's a small range of styles and colors to pick from. I went ginger as usual and I was pleased to see my hair color was indeed described as such for once.

Do you have any eyes that don't glow?

From there it's off to the nearby Ancient Ruins, handily marked on your map. The map is good, if a little cluttered. You can click on it and your character will walk to the mark you make, which is just as well because once I got to town it was the only damn way I could find anything. The place was heaving. I couldn't see the crafting stations for the crafters!

The reason it was so busy was the same reason I was there: there's a three week open beta of sorts, actually labeled a "Demo" but effectively the full game, only with progress capped at level 10. It started a couple of days ago and runs until the end of the upcoming Next Fest on June 16th. The game then shuts up shop for a few days before going into Early Access on June 20th.

In town, I was still following the Wisp's lead. He'd already had me picking up sticks and stones and now he got me making flint tools, then gathering fibers to make cloth strips and wood to make logs and then making planks... You know the drill. Only, this is a crafting game so it's not like Once Human, where you make a bunch of crafting stations and the throw in all the mats and out comes the thing you want so you can go use it to kill things.

Would that t'were so simple.

It's not even like Valheim or Nightingale, where more sophisticated items require multiple stations and sub-combines. This is the full-on crafting experience, where every last little thing has to be whittled and sanded and braided and refined in some way before it can be used to make the next thing, which then makes something else and on and on until your fingers bleed. The road ahead is clear, even at the very, very start. I don't want to know where it goes once you begin to make complex tools or sophisticated clothing.

Again, I appreciate this is exactly what a certain market segment is looking for: complexity for complexity's sake I even enjoy a modicum of that sort of thing in crafting myself, on occasion. I just do not want it to be the main thrust of any game I'm going to spend any significant amount of time playing. It's too hard for me not to be aware that instead of doing it in virtuality I could much more usefully be doing the same thing around my real-world home. It's not like there aren't a hundred DIY projects I ought to be getting on with. I made a list of them last week...

So, the appeal of games like this is somewhat mitigated for me by guilt. Still, I could easily be led astray if it was also fun. But it wasn't. Not at all. 

Have trunk, will trudge. (IYKYK, right?)

I think it might have been fun if the controls had been less finicky. A lot less. And if it had been a lot quieter. It's nice to see so many people taking an interest but there's a threshold even for virtual socialization and for me it comes some considerable distance short of a crowded bus station.

All of which makes it sound like I'm writing Bitcraft off. I am not. Even though I didn't enjoy my time with the game today, I can quite easily imagine having plenty of fun with it in the future. It's on my Steam wishlist and it's going to stay there. For me, there's going to have to be some considerable improvement in the control system before I consider giving the full game a try but I strongly suspect that will come in time, especially if the game does pick up traction in Early Access.

For now, though, I can think of better options for doing much the same thing. Palia, for example, or maybe even Stars Reach. Although, as observant readers will already have noticed, I'm not playing much of those two either. 

Maybe I should just stay in my lane. Which is clearly not this one.

Crystal Of Atlan: Very First Impressions

There's just no consistency, is there? At one extreme there's the likes of Camelot Unchained, a "game" that was announced with a flurry of publicity, drew huge attention and then spent the next dozen or so years locked behind very closed doors, "in development", where it remains even now. And then, at the far end of the curve, you get something like this.

It seems like Crystal of Atlan popped up out of nowhere just a few days ago and then this morning I was playing it. I'd never heard of it until I saw an item on MMOBomb a couple of weeks ago, although apparently the actual reveal was back in March. Still not much of a lead-up, even then.

I didn't pay much attention until the same site followed up yesterday with the news the game had already launched. MassivelyOP, which currently seems to have a weird love-to-hate obsession with gacha mechanics (I think it must be an American thing. I don't really get what the supposed problem is but then every market town over here has about five betting shops on the high street.) also flagged up the release with a headline focusing on the overly-defensive assertion by developer NuVerse (A ByteDance subsidiary.) that CoA "is not a gacha game". Reason being?  "We do not have gacha mechanics for character or weapon pulls".

You get one free summon. Meanies.

Having just spent an hour with the game, I'd have to question that logic. There's a full gacha mechanic for both Pets and Outfits and it looks and feels exactly like every other gacha deal I've seen. I think we'll need to know a bit more about just how essential Pets are to gameplay before we can give the developers a pass on that one. Outfits, I guess, at least aren't likely to be pay-to-win but even there I can't see it's any better if your objection is to the principle of the thing.

Not that I give a damn. I have hundreds and hundreds of hours in multiple gacha games, all of which I've played with considerable enjoyment, and so far I have never needed to pay a red cent to any of them. I have an academic understanding of the problem, if that's what we're going to call it, but no emotional attachment or personal, anecdotal experience to give that understanding any of the sense of loathing or outrage that permeates most of the conversation around gacha mechanics. 

Here's my suggestion for anyone wary of playing F2P gacha games in case it ends up costing them a fortune or making them feel frustrated because they can't progress without paying: just play the damn game for free as long as its fun, then stop the moment you feel you can't do what you want without paying for pulls. In my experience, that's going to take a while.

Okay, one for each draw. Still...

And it's not like there aren't a gazillion other games to play, is it? Or like you signed some kind of contract, where you promised to finish what you started. Can't get any further without spending money and don't want to spend money? Then quit!

Oh, but I want to know how the story turns out! Watch someone playing on Twitch then or watch a play-through on YouTube. Or just read the walktrhough on the wiki. Scratch that itch and move on.

Well, that was a rant I wasn't expecting. Oh well, got it out of my system now. Let's move on...

So, first impressions. Is an hour long enough? Well, I got to Level 10 if that counts. And honestly, the game feels so familiar right from the start, it's as if I could do the First Impressions piece from the opening cut-scene.

So let's start with that, why not? It's short, slick and very pretty to look at. It's also about as generic as they come and whoever wrote it knows that as well as you do. It's like a tl:dr version of the opening of a dozen similar games I've played: there was a cataclysm, a Hero appeared and sorted it out, everything was nice for a while, something got lost, the world turned bad again, now you have to find the maguffin. Some of those parts may not be in the correct order but they were all in there, somewhere.

I'm the one with her back to the camera.

Next comes one of those completely pointless action sequences, where you charge through a "dungeon" following a glowing trail and use a whole load of abilities you have absolutely no understanding of to despatch a horde of entirely unthreatening, disposable grunts, finmishing up with a battle with a massive boss (A dragon in this case. How original!), the outcome of which is entirely out of your hands. The whole thing is made even less useful as a training excercise since the character you're playing keeps changing, although that does do a fair job of demonstrating the playstyles of the various classes, thereby preparing you for...

"Character Creation", which I put in quotes because that's what they call it even though it's patently nothing of the sort. It's just "Pick A Class". That's literally the only choice you have to make. There's one race, human, and all the classes are gender-locked. There's zero customisation of any kind. You don't even get to give yourself a name. (There turns out to be a good reason for that, though.)

Gender-locking is another super-controversial issue and one with which I have a great deal more sympathy than gachaphobia. I would have been pissed if all the classes I wanted to play had been male, for sure. But they weren't, so I'm good. 

Apparently turning her back to the camera is her thing. And, I guess, mine now, too.

All of that took maybe ten minutes and then it was into the world proper. Oh, I did have to choose a server. There were two reccomended ones in North America and third in Europe, which wasn't recommended. That seemed odd. Usually games can tell where I am and assume I want a faster ping. And I might have, too, if it hadn't been for something I saw yesterday about the publishing for the game in Europe changing hands in June. Best to avoid that, I thought, so I went with the recommendation.

Next it was into the world itself. It's very pretty. Really nice to look at. I'd have taken quite a few screenshots if I could have found a way to switch the UI off. I spent a while going through every option in setttings but if there is one, I couldn't find it. Black mark for that.

Absolutely everything that happened after that was instantly recognizable from games I'd played before. I mean all of it. Here's what I can remember, in sequence, from about an hour ago. 

Even looks like the town in Dragon Nest.

• Arrive just outside some small town
• Get met by some perky little girl in big pants, who's been expecting you
• Get taken into town to meet the person in charge, who turns out to be a bit of a jerk
• Have your authority and suitability for the job questioned but then get sent to do it anyway
• Naturally, the job involves going down a mine and killing some baddies
  
• Go down the mine, kill some baddies
• Run into some big guy having trouble with more baddies
• Rescue him
• Bring him back
• Discover he was trying to rescue his daughter
• Agree to go find her 
• And some more missing miners
• Go back down the mine and defend Big Pants Girl while she fixes some tech thing.
• Kill a lot more baddies including a couple of bosses
  
• Find a clue to the missing daughter
  
• Come back and tell her dad....

... and on it goes like that. We've all been there. Lots of times. 

And guess what? It works! I had a good time. A very disposable, meaningless good time but so is eating ice-cream and we don't trash that for lack of originality, do we? Well I don't. I love ice-cream.

There were a couple of things that stood out. Little wrinkles I don't remember seeing before and that I thought were good and that suggested this game had been put together by people with both a sense of humor and some pride in their work. 

One was the explanation for why I hadn't even been asked to name my character in "Character Creation". 

That's because the way you prove your fitness for the job to the jerk I mentioned earlier is to whip out your employment papers from the Adventurers Guild and stuff them under his nose. And in order to make the quest move on, you have to sign them at the bottom with the name you're giving your character.

I thought that was neat. Also, I really liked the way there's no actual instruction on what to do. You just have to figure it out from context. It felt very... organic.

So did the other bit I liked, which is where an advertising droid calls out to you, trying to sell you something and when you tell it you aren't interested it turns out what it was trying to sell you is  membership to the same Adventurers Guild you're already in, so it changes tack and tries to sell you on the benefits instead. It's a very clever way to slip in a bit of tutorial without it seeming too obvious and once again it felt very... organic. I'd say immersive but maybe that would be over-stating it.

This isn't bad translation. It's the writers parodying bad translation.
Made me laugh, anyway.

This might be the time to mention the translation. It's excellent. Flawless, in fact. Demotic, naturalistic English throughout, albeit with a slightly 1950s television western tinge to it in places. I think someone might have said "darn tooting" once. Or something like that.

Voice acting is minimal but fine when it occurs. I was a little taken aback when my character spoke. She didn't do it much. It certainly didn't have the impact of when that happens in Wuthering Waves but then then comparing the two games is like comparing Hanna Barbera to Studio Ghibli.

One odd thing I particularly want to mention: when I say Crystal of Atlan reminds me of lots of games I've played, that's true, but it really reminds me of one specific game - Dragon Nest. 

Firstly, CoA uses exactly the same structure as Dragon Nest. There's a hub in which all players mingle, making it an MMO of sorts, but all you do there is get missions that take you into instances. So far, so generic. There's a map showing the instances strung out in a line that you have to follow like a trail, completing each and returning to the hub for the next mission before you can move on to the next. Dragon Nest also has one of those.

Once was enough, thanks. Also, what the hell is going on with your pants?

Where I really started to get Dragon Nest vibes, though, was inside the instances. They look similar and they're set up the same way, with a linear path that goes through several stages that require zoning. In each, faceless swarms of mobs need to be dispatched before you reach a mini-boss. The mini-bosses even have the same kind of A/B/C/D difficulty ratings as they do in Dragon Nest and the fights feel very similar.

You can optionally repeat each dungeon to earn loot or xp or points or you can choose to continue to the next one. Dragon Nest had a similar mechanic. None of this is in any way conclusive, of course, but I've played a lot of these games and this one really reminded me of that one in particular.

Where's me hat?!

And then I met that guy who needed rescuing and he was a smith with a huge beard and he used to be a big deal and in Dragon Nest there's a guy who looks a lot like him and is also famous only he's a dirigible engineer. And then I had to rescue the smith's young daughter who'd gone into the mines and the guy in Dragon Nest has a young son who... You get the idea.

I think it all just comes down the developers pulling from the same set of tropes and using the same off-the-shelf mechanics but Dragon Nest was where I saw a lot of them first so that's where I know them from. I ought to play Dragon Nest again... It's a great game.

As I worked my way through the missions, I got plenty of xp and leveled up fast. I also got plenty of gear, which the game told me to equip, so I did. 

That was very disappointing. Not because the gear was no good - it was fine. It was disappointing because the little icons made it seem like it was going to look great when I put it on but absolutely none of it displayed at all.

I went from wearing what you see above to... what you see above.  At one point my paper doll said I was in full plate armor but as far as anyone could see I was still in the shirt, bustier and green jacket. As for the flying helmet with the goggles and the jaunty feather? Must be invisible.

None of that is remotely surprising in a game that claims not to have gacha mechanics for anything that matters but that does have them for Outfits. I just hope that, like Noah's Heart, there are at least some alternative ways of changing your look. I did spot one in the Pre-registration freebies, which I got even though I never pre-registered for the game. I need to be Level 15 to use it though so I haven't tried it to see how it works.

In Dragon Nest he was an airship engineer and he had a son, not a daughter,
but I swear it's the same guy...

And that pretty much covers it. I suppose I should say something about the combat but at these early levels it's one hundred per cent button-mashing as far as I'm concerned so I don't have much insight there. Button-mashing does the job though and I haven't died yet or needed to use a health potion if that tells you anything. Oh, and there's a dodge mechanic that actually works really well and feels very comfortable, so that's a big plus.

Another big plus is the option to have the mouse cursor available at all times. It's not promoted. It's buried in the settings somewhere. I only found it because I was in there looking for a way to switch off the UI. 

CoA is a very much an action-rpg  and a pretty slick one and these days I can play games like that with a surprising amount of facility, so I no longer miss my old hot bars the way I once did. It's nice to have the option all the same and I very much do like being able to click on UI elements at will, without having to hold down a key at the same time. All action games should offer that choice.

And that's about it for now, I think. Overall, my first impressions are quite positive. The game doesn't have an ounce of originality but it does have plenty of visual flair, it's well-translated and it's slick as you like. Everything works perfectly, no glitches or bugs that I saw. And most importantly, it's fun. 

If I was short of ways to fill my time, I'd be happy to fill a few hours with this. The problem, if that's what to call it, is that this kind of seemingly effortless professionalism makes the all those more interesting and original games we'd rather be playing look even worse when they flop pathetically in Early Access, unfinished, full of bugs and barely any fun at all.

Exactly why is that, I wonder? It surely can't just be money, can it? 

Vague Impressions And Good Intentions

We need to talk about Stars Reach. 

Well, okay, we don't. But I think I might. This post is going to go over some familiar ground but in the hope that, from here on, most of it won't have to be repeated. Or, rather, that I won't feel the need to keep repeating it to make it clear to myself. 

Think of it as a talking cure.

It's beginning to look very much as if Stars Reach could be turning into one of those games I post about but don't actually play. Which, if I'm honest, is most games at the moment. But this is different in one crucial way. 

Most of the others are games I would like to play but, just at the moment, can't seem to fit in to my self-imposed, over-committed schedule. I have every intention of getting back to many them at some point, even if in a few cases I secretly know that's never going to happen. The intent and the desire is there. 

Not so with Stars Reach. I've never been much more than lukewarm on the prospect of playing the game myself, even while I was highly intrigued by the project itself. I could see it was going to be a big deal, within the niche at least if not so much outside it, and I thought it was sure to be something we'd all be talking about for a good while. 

That's why I applied for the alpha but once I got in I found the whole thing a lot more entertaining than I'd expected, while equally unexpectedly, surprisingly few people in the blogosphere seemed interested after all. I wrote about the game quite a bit but feedback was slight.

There are nearly two dozen posts here tagged "Stars Reach", nearly all of them "What I Did On My Holidays" style posts about the adventures I've had while "testing" the game. Alphas and betas make for good blogging if only because something's always going wrong.

There will almost certainly be more post like those. Having stumped up my $30 during the Kickstarter, I'm flagged for access until the game goes live, although I still can't say for certain that I've done all the registrations and account linkages required. I have now got the requisite Firstlook.gg account and it's linked to my Steam ID but whether it matches the other details about me in the system is anyone's guess.

If not, it might be a problem someday but it doesn't seem to matter too much at the moment. I have the client and I can update it and log in so that's all good. And yet, logging in I am not.

There's the perennial problem of the schedule, of course. The current cadence is still based around three-hour slots, two or three times a week. There was one yesterday, there are two tomorrow and there's another on Saturday. I forgot all about yesterday's and I'm working Saturday, although that test is in the evening so, theoretically, I could make it. 

I won't though. I'll have too much else to do.

There's talk, as always, about extending the length and frequency of testing but as this squib from MassivelyOP explains, it's going to be a while. 

 "Playable Worlds is working toward an ongoing 24/7 test for Stars Reach, although the studio said that getting there will be “complicated.”"

Raph explains exactly what those complications are in this video but the tl:dr is a lot of back-end work to be done and a lot more content to be created before the servers can put up the "Open All Week" notices. 

For a start, the game needs to be able to run safely on its own, without a whole bunch of devs sitting around watching it to make sure it doesn't fall over. Almost as importantly, if players are going to be able to log in whenever they feel like it and stay as long as they want, there has to be enough to keep them busy for all that time. Raph suggests it'll take "months" to get to that point so it sounds like we're looking at the current short, sporadic access windows for the summer at least.

Right now, I can't see myself even wanting to play (I think we can dispense with the fig-leaf of "testing", post-Kickstarter.) either frequently or for long stretches but that could certainly change. These kinds of things always start seeming more attractive when the days get shorter and the rain sets in. 24/7 in November will seem a lot more appealing than it does now.

The real problem for me, though, has nothing to do with access. It doesn't even have all that much to do with persistence. True, the thought of frequent wipes and resets is off-putting and I notice now we have the prospect of partial and specific wipes to contend with, too. 

The latest update includes what PW is framing positively as an "XP Refund System", which sounds great, until you read the follow-on: "When this update begins, all of your XP will be refunded to you, all your skill nodes will be unlearned, and you’ll be able to respend your XP any way you desire." 

I'm sure that reads as "Yay! I get all my points back for a do-over!" to some people but I don't much enjoy spending points on talents or skills even the first time in any game. I mostly see it as a tedious administrative chore that I wish the game would just take off my hands. Having to do it over because of an update doesn't so much strike me as an opportunity as it makes me anxious that I'm going to have to keep on re-doing the damn things whenever anything changes in the future.

Stiill, as I was saying, even that's not the real issue holding me back from wanting to play more, if and when that becomes possible. It's more of an existential problem than a practical one.

Take the current update, amusingly titled "Better Homes and Gardens". There's a lot of good stuff in there, from shared loot and experience to encourage both formal and informal social play to the ability to create bonsai trees on your homestead. Most of the tweaks and snips sound like they're intended to make the game more fun, which is what you'd hope.

But then you get something like this:

"All bushes have collision with players now. They’re going to get in your way and that’s intentional. "

Or this:

"We’ve added thickets to the game. These are very large bushes and they can’t be harvested. If you don’t like them, you’ll need to burn them out."

I don't know... is it just me or do those sound like things you'd want patched out of a game, not in? It's like the constant focus on making mobs even more aggressive and annoying. It's almost as though someone thinks that irritating players is somehow going to make them want to play more. 

And the trouble with that is... they're probably right. It often seems to me that the target audience for Stars Reach is people who actively enjoy being obstructed, delayed and generally messed about with as they play. It's not just that they want to do things the hard way, it's more that "hard" isn't enough. It has to be awkward as well.

None of this is bad as such. It's just bad for me. I read the update notes every time they pop up in my email and every time, there's something in them that makes me think "Well, that makes things worse...). Sometimes it's a small change like the bushes you can't run through any more, sometimes it's a whole systemic upheaval like making Cooking an entirely separate activity, no longer connected to Crafting. (Also in the current update.)

On paper, I think development is progressing very well. The direction of travel is clear now and the game is shaping up. I can see the game Stars Reach intends to be in a way I very much could not, back when testing began. That it's not going to be a game for me isn't really relevant. 

And anyway, it might still be. The way it's heading suggests the finished product will be able to sustain a variety of different playstyles. When it's able to do that, I might be able to find one I enjoy.

For now, though, I suspect most of my commentary is going to come from picking holes in the patch notes. And that's fine. It's an honorable blogging tradition, after all, and one I'm happy to continue.

Sweet Poison or A Girl's Story

In writing about Wuthering Waves, I find it very hard to avoid repeating myself endlessly. It's staggeringly gorgeous to look at, the storytelling is excellent and the voice acting is top-notch. There's an extraordinary amount to do, the gameplay is varied and wide-ranging and the whole game feels welcoming and comfortable throughout. Yada yada yada...

Also, as I say every time, I find it exhausting and overwhelming to the point where I need a good lie down to get over it every time I indulge. It's like a delicious but extremely rich dessert, something you crave but know, for your own good, you can only indulge in every so often.

That cadence makes it very tough to write about, too. Because I've fallen into this pattern of leaving a couple of weeks between each session, biting off a complete chunk of story every time, I'm stuck with reviewing each chapter without trying to get too spoilery, while using a selection of screenshots I took along the way as illustrations and maybe dropping in a critical comment or two about anything that strikes me as being particularly notable, unusual or well done.

I'd add "or that could have been done better" to that last but honestly, there's not very often much that I feel could be improved and there seems to be less every time I play. Wuthering Waves feels very "finished" compared to just about all the games I'm used to or that I've played over the years.

It wasn't always that way or I don't believe so. I seem to remember at the start there were a lot more translation issues and plenty of times when what the voice actors were saying didn't match what I was reading in the subtitles. This morning I saw just one example of that and even then it was only a single word that differed.

Contrast that to Once Human, another relatively slick, well-funded and successful game which, as I recently noted, gets a five star rating from me in most departments. Even there, the tendency, as it is in many games I've played, is for the words you're hearing not to match the ones you see. 

I was playing OH last night. I did a couple of new quests and the words the voice actors were speaking barely resembled the text at all. The weirdest part about that wasn't that the production team couldn't get it right, it was that both versions were coherent and well-written, so either of them would have been fine. How they ended up using both is the mystery. Just pick one, guys!

I suppose it's a minor issue anyway. There's no real reason to read along with the actors after all, even if having subtitles on for everything, all the time, is the current fashion. I do find it distracting, all the same. I wish production teams would talk to each other now and again and settle on a final version. Or at least listen to the QA reports when they tell them "The words don't match the voices". I mean, it's not like its a hard error to spot. Maybe it's intentional, I don't know...

As I said, that wasn't a problem for me this morning, as I played through the quest that came up top of the list when I logged into Wuthering Waves for the first time in a fortnight. I had kind of half promised myself I wouldn't do that - just blindly follow the prompts. I was going to go off and do some exploring, open up the map a bit, do my own thing but it's so easy to just slip into the old habit of going where the quest-marker tells you. And when what you find when you get there is often so compelling, why would you want to stop?

In this case what I was being led towards turned out to be a Companion Story. There's one of those for all the main Resonators, I think, not just the leads but the co-stars, too. I haven't done very many of them. I think this might have been the fourth. Maybe the fifth. I should check sometime because they've all been excellent so far.

This was no exception. Cantarella's horror-inflected tale is chilling, even disturbing, but ultimately joyous. It also stands well inside the boundaries of the primary storyline, adding some depth and texture to the core narrative, rather than simply filling out the biography of the character herself.

And it's long! Boy, is it ever! It took me at least two hours which, judging by the full play-throughs on YouTube, seems to be about average. The huge majority of my time was spent, as always, watching animated characters act and listening to their voice-actors speak. I watched an anime movie, basically. 

I doubt that if you cut all the gameplay and just strung the cut-scenes together you'd get a cut lasting less than seventy-five minutes, a very decent length for an animated film. There was a fair amount of fighting this time but it was all so easy, none of it took very long. Ditto the puzzles, which mostly involved not too much more than following the visual prompts and pressing a few buttons at the appropriate moment. There's even a potentially terrifying jumping puzzle that the game just takes over and does for you.

In keeping with what has been the very welcome trend in the past sessions I've played, even the final boss fight is both easy and partially completed through cut scenes. I sincerely hope it's a trend that continues. As for the narrative, without giving any spoilers, I'd say 90% of Cantarella's story was clarity itself, without any of the confusing technobabble just about all the characters are prone to. 

The wrap-up, though, did its best to make up for that with a flurry of lines about frequencies and sonoro spheres that I'm a little concerned to say I mostly understood. I worry I may have been assimilated.

And then there was very final coda, because no Wuthering Waves story is ever complete without at least three or four false endings. That was... odd. One aspect of the game I do my best not to mention is the ever-present, free-floating sexual charge that seems to hang in the air around some of the main characters like the opiated miasma across the poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz. 

Nervously passing over Cantarella's distracting personal appearance, which gives me disturbing of Eurotrash as presented by Antoine de Caunes and Jean-Paul Gautier back in the 'nineties, in this case I'm talking about the almost predatory way she looks at, talks to and occasionally even touches the player-character. She's by no means the only NPC to have clear and obvious designs on "Rover" but she's the first one to try to put her intentions on a co-habitational basis.

All of which might be uncomfortable if my character wasn't so very much the alpha in every situation. I'm used, as we all must be now, to having the character I'm playing be treated as some kind of famous hero or maybe even a demi-god but in Wuthering Waves it's quite self-evidently true. When NPCs act awe-struck or honored to meet her, it's with palpably good reason and they, frankly, do not know the half of it. 

With that level of authority, I'm pretty sure she can handle a few over-familiar flirtations, not that she ever seems to notice there's even a subtext. She tends to look, at most, slightly baffled by the attention but by and large it just seems to fly straight over her head. 

As I've often said, if I'm going to stick with a game for long, I really need to feel an affinity for my character, something that's almost inevitably going to be harder to achieve in a game where the player gets no choice at all in who they play, other than to pick a gender. Add to that a complete inability to affect what your character looks like (Seriously, are there no cosmetics in the game at all outside the cash shop?) and then to add insult to injury, dress the main character in the worst outfit of anyone on the team and it's surprising I've been able to bond with her at all.

That I have owes a significant amount to the skill of the actor who voices her and also to the way that vocalization is handled in production and writing. I generally prefer the good old "Silent Protagonst" approach, so I was happy enough when all my character did was nod and gesture, which was all she did for a long time after I started playing.  When she suddenly began to speak, I was first astonished and then delighted at how much I enjoyed hearing the sound of her voice.

There are two reasons for that. Firstly, I really appreciate the way she doesn't speak in every scene, only when she has something worth saying or to give her internal monologue an airing. It makes the times when she does speak up feel much more significant. Secondly, and much more importantly, I love the way the actor voicing my character handles the dialog. I like her voice, which obviously helps, but mostly I love her phrasing, which is reliably close to the way I hear the lines in my head. 

You'd be surprised how often that doesn't happen. Lots of actors seem to have very different ideas to me about cadence, emphasis and even interpretation. It's jarring to hear them stressing the wrong syllables or drawing attention away from the subtext, which is why, on balance, I like my characters not to speak. If they all spoke up as eloquently and authoritatively as this, though, I'd be happy to sit back and enjoy the show rather than imagining I could do a better job myself.

With Cantarella's story told I imagine a return to the main storyline will be next. As usual, I'm going to need a while to decompress before I take that on. I'll at least try to make it a shorter break than last time. It's hard enough to remember the plot as it is.

#16 - Magmus - Born 3 May 2003 - 12 Days 12 Hours

I said I was going to finish this 25th Anniversary feature and I will, although it might take until the 30th to do it. So, where were we when we left off?

Out of sequence, that's where. The last entry was for Shonki, the gnome cleric I took over from Mrs. Bhagpuss and ended up playing as my main for more than a year. That post went up back in October last year and naturally, when I decided to write another, I'd forgotten where I'd got to. 

Surprisingly, I did make some notes for the project back at the start and I still have them, so I was able to check who was up next. I looked at the last post and saw Shonki was #14 so I looked down the list for #15 and found it was... Shonki. My Shadowknight, Timblewoot, was actually #14, as it says in the title of his own post.

I thought for a moment maybe they'd both been created on the same day. I do have a couple of  characters ranked 17= for just that reason. In fact, they'll be in the post after this one because, as you can see from the title, I'm up to #16 now. But no, I just got the numbers wrong. Shonki is really #15.

That leaves me with the dilemma of whether to go back and edit the title of a post that's over half a year old, something I'd never normally do. I've kind of solved that problem by writing about it here, though. If I did go back and change it, this introduction wouldn't make any sense any more (That's assuming it does now..) so I guess I'll leave everything as it is.

Which brings us, at last, to the true subject of the post: Magmus. It's just as well I had something to vamp with up to now because I don't have an awful lot to say about him.

Perhaps the most interesting thing, from my perspective at least, is that he's the original Magmus. I have a whole load of characters of that name now, scattered across a bunch of games |I barely remember, but he was the first. 

I didn't specifically pick "Magmus" as the name I was going to use for throwaway characters but that's what it ended up being. Later, when I was starting to feel a little tired of making up a new name for every single character I rolled in what was an ever-increasing number of games and servers, his name came to mind as a useful generic. It had three very attractive features as far as I was concerned: it was short, I could remember it and no-one else ever seemed to want it. 

When I came up with it the first time, though, it was just another in an  ever-increasing liturgy of one-offs. And anyway, the original Magmus wasn't even supposed to be called "Magmus". I wanted to call him Magnus (God knows why.) but to no-one's surprise, I'm sure, that turned out to be taken. So, employing all the wit and subtlety David Walliams has become famous for, I changed one letter of his name and voila! There he was. 

Magmus was the first character I created on the exciting new, non-transfer server, Stromm, which came online on 3 May 2003 and which was the first what we'd now call "fresh start" server we'd seen in the game for quite a while. I had to fact-check those dates for this post but I'm pleased to say I found a very authorative source to confirm my memory of the event:

 

It's hard to say whether that gives me more or less confidence in AI. 

Magmus is a cleric, currently Level 63, making him my second-highest of that class, only three levels behind Shonki but with a quarter of the time played. He must really have gone hard at some point but I honestly can't remember much about it.

Not to pre-empt a couple more entries that will be coming later in the series but Stromm eventually became a server on which Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent a good deal of time duoing. That was later, though, when we came back to the game after a year or two away.

When the server was new, we were still heavily into proper, old-school EQ grouping. We started on Stromm on Day One, knowing no-one and yet in a matter of days we'd made acquaintances who soon became friends and then became a guild. It goes without saying I can rememember none of their names now.

On our first run on Stromm, none of that lasted too long. Two or three months, maybe. And Magmus didn't feature much in any of it. The day after he was borne I gave him a sister called Magmia (He's a Dwarf, she's a Gnome. Don't ask how that works...) and she pretty much shunted him into the shadows right away.

Magmia, however, deserves - and will get - her own post, so she can wait to tell her story then. This is Magmus's biography, such as it is, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't want to share any of his time in the sun with his annoyingly bumptious little sister.

It's just a shame I have so little to say about him. I have no idea when or how he got into the sixties. It sure as hell wasn't back in that original run, when I think he'd have been lucky to have made it into double figures. Maybe he was one of the featured players in all that duoing we did a few years later. A cleric is always good in a duo.

I can see, looking at his bags, which are, of course, full, that he's been out relatively recently. He's carrying several rabbits from the Pride events and they haven't been around that long. That may well turn out to have been his final outing, though. I think his chances of doing much more are extremely limited. He's probably retired already, if I'm going to be realistic about it.

So that wasn't much of an entry in the series, was it? Never mind, Magmia will make up for her brother's shortcomings. Like she always does.

Also, since I'm here, I'll just mention one other thing that happened when I logged in today to take some screenshots for the post. 

They've just added a button to server select that lets you see the names of all your characters on each server without having to log in. ABOUT TIME!!!

The time and stress that would have saved me last year, when I was doing the background research for all of this! That'a  few hours of my life I'll never get back. 

Still, at least it encourages me to carry on with the rest of the series. You can thank Daybreak for that.

 

A Question Of Gravity

If there's another developer half as keen as Starry on asking players what they think about the game they're playing, I certainly haven't come across them. The number of surveys Starry puts up for Once Human verges on the absurd. I mean, I'm all for taking a sounding but come on!

Yesterday I noticed, a couple of days late as usual, that there'd been a major update to the game. And when I say "major" I'm not ladling it on for effect the way publishers do with that "Soon to be a major motion picture" line they slap on any book that's even been optioned.

Just take a look at the details on the official website... no, wait, don't do that. You'll go blind!

Have you ever tried to find anything on there? It's like someone hired an advertising agency to produce fifty campaigns at once and then chucked a bomb into the office and filmed the explosion. Try the Steam Community Page instead. That's a lot easier to follow.

Or if you're pushed for time you could watch the trailer. Here it is.

 Wait, though... there's another

And a third!

 This is all for the one update, mind you. There's a lot going on. I could break it down but we'd be here all day. The tl:dr is 

• New PvE Scenario
• New Vision Wheel 
• New PvP Mode

It's like three expansions one on top of another in a way, although the PVP "Raidzone" is being touted as a spin-off game in its own right.  

To get back to those surveys, last night I completed three of them. It's been about two weeks since the last time I played and I did two then. So that's five surveys this month I've filled out. They duplicate heavily but no two are exactly the same. 

For most of the questions that ask for a 1-5 rating, I gave the game five stars. Story, lore, graphics, gameplay, combat, you name it, I'm Very Satisfied with it. Would I recommend it to my friends? Yes, I would. Why? because it's the best game of its kind I've played. I am the model of a satisfied customer.

There is one aspect of Once Human that I'm Very Disatisfied with, though, and I'm happy to take every opportunity to tell the developers about it. That's the ludicrous and wholly unnecessary complexity of the Server/Scenario/Vision Wheel set-up. It's the main thing that puts me off playing more than I do.

Take the last couple of days. I wanted to try the new Vision Wheel event. It sounded like it was going to be a lot of fun. Here's how it works:

"The inverted star will generate gravitational tides from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM (server time) daily, during which players will enter a unique low-gravity state known as Stellar Levity, allowing for higher jumps, extended airtime, immunity to fall damage, and significantly increased Load capacity."

Basically, for half the time you're playing, you'll be able to jump around like a kangaroo on a pogo stick and goof about in the air like one of the Flying Wallendas with a jetpack. Or something.

I only recently made a new character but I started her on a Novice server and those don't get Vision Wheels or any new events, so she was out. Luckily, my original character was idling away in Eternaland with nothing better to do so I thought I'd wake her up, pick a server running the new scenario (Endless Dream), which also looks interesting, and that way I could try both the new things at once.

Seems simple enough, doesn't it? Hah! Doesn't work that way as I found out but only after I'd moved her.

Because Starry can never do anything the way anyone else does, the new PvE Scenario, which is technically still in "Early Access", is nevertheless available via exactly the same procedure as any other scenario. You don't have to use Steam's Beta process or sign up for anything. It's just there on the list with all the rest.

What I didn't know then was that EA servers don't get the Vision Wheel. I guess if you're testing you want to stay focused That makes sense. What I also didn't know, at least until this morning, was that lots of servers don't get the Vision Wheel either, not just the EA and Novice ones.

As I now understand, before you to pick a server, you need to check a whole bunch of things: the region, the population, the current scenario stage the server's at, which scenario it's running and whether it has access to the Vision Wheel or not. Probably some other stuff I don't know too, I shouldn't wonder.

Some of this is obvious, some of it isn't. Some of it requires you to click for further information or read a mouse-over. Most of this, last night, I did not do. I just picked a server running Endless Dream and signed my older character up for it. 

And that started very well. The new scenario begins with an excellent intro movie that I watched with enjoyment. Then I glided down, grabbed a spot for my base and jogged over to Meyer's Market to talk to the woman with the old-school TV for a head. She hands out the quests for the new storyline.

So far, so good. Except I really wanted to do the anti-gravity thing and there was no sign of it. So I opened up the map to have a look, which was when I discovered a couple of awkward facts about my new home. 

One was that, as I've already explained, the Starfall Inversion event isn't available at all on Endless Dream servers. The other is that the Endless Dream content itself starts at around Level 18. Or at least it appears that way. I could be wrong. I hope I am.

I'm probably not, though. As far as I can tell, it takes place mostly, maybe entirely, in instances and although there are plenty of them, the lowest Recommended Level for any I could see on the  map was 18. And that was in the starting area so I doubt there are any lower anywhere else. 

I was clearly going to have to buckle down and level up before I could even poke my nose in for a look. Which was annoying because I just leveled one character to 15 a couple of weeks ago. I didn't really want to do it all again quite so soon. And in any case, it was the other new stuff I wanted to see first.

And that's how I came to spend the rest of the session filling out surveys instead of playing. This morning I started over yet again with a third character. I have some Free Move tokens left over, I think, so I could have moved someone to a server running a scenario with the Vision Wheel but I still wanted to see the Endless Dream too so that didn't seem like the best plan. 

Instead, I spent a fair amount of time checking all the servers carefully until I was sure I  knew what content was available on which. When I was positive I had it right, I realized I was going to have to make another new character to get onto the one I wanted, so that's what I did.

And then I had to run that character through the unskippable tutorial. Seriously, why do unskippable tutorials for characters after the first on an account even exist? 

All of that took me an hour or so, plus the inevitable setting up of the base, after which I was finally able to go look for the new up-in-the-air stuff. Only it was four in the morning, game time, and the gravity doesn't switch off until nine. 

Luckily, time passes fairly quickly in game so it didn't feel like too long before I saw the message that things were about to change. And it was worth the wait.

I might - probably will - do a whole post on the Starfall Inversion, when I've been able to give it a couple more sessions, but my initial impressions are very favorable. For a start, it looks great. When the gravity goes, a blue haze appears that makes the whole world look ethereal and somehow cleaner, so that's nice. Then there's the huge sphere hanging in the sky that might remind you of the Death Star or Warworld depending on your personal points of reference. It's hard not to notice things have changed.

I'm guessing that sphere is responsible for the disruption to local physics although it could just be a very large chunk of space detritus. There are certainly plenty of disused satellites and space capsules drifting about, along with all kinds of free-floating junk. Everything from billboards and bits of building to loose rowing boats and cars.

The temptation to try to get up to them is enormous but at the start, even with the hugely increased jump height and no risk of falling damage if you miss, most of them are too high to reach. That can be fixed through the acquisition of a new gear set that, among other things,  gives you the ability to jump even higher. 

I already have the boots. I got them from a Gear Crate guarded by a very impressive new elite mob and his many lackeys and hench-creatures. I spotted him as I was trying to gain enough height to find out what the glowing rings in the sky might be (They increase your gliding speed if you fly through them, just like similar ones in several other games I could name.),

Since I had nothing to lose, playing a brand new character, I thought I'd take him on. It was a chaotic fight, what with the excessive use of the z-axis, and a long one, mostly because although I'd made a pistol, I'd forgotten to equip it, so I had to chop away at the thing's tentacles with a machete. In the end, I came out the winner and those boots, among other goodies, were my reward.

I carried on leaping and gliding until the clock ticked round to 9pm game time and the gravity came back on. That would be a nasty surprise if it happened while you were high in the air. Maybe there should be a klaxon. 

I was on the ground so I was fine but by then I'd been playing for a couple of hours, about my limit for a session these days, so I thought it would be a suitable place to stop. All in all I was very impressed with the new event. If nothing else it's great for goofing about, just like I hoped it would be.

I'm not sure I'll pursue whatever the storyline is with any great diligence but I would like to take advantage of the advertised "Build a Home in the Sky" feature so I will definitely be giving it some more time. As for the Endless Dream, I may have to consider my options again. 

I really don't want to be leveling three characters at once.