Crystal Of Atlan: Further First Impressions

As you might surmise from the picture above, I have been making some progress in Crystal Of Atlan. I'm Level 27 now. This is as much a surprise to me as anyone. I didn't expect to be playing the game much at all after downloading it on a whim, especially since I'm currently not doing a lot of gaming. And anyway, if I was going to pick the pace back up, wouldn't there be a whole load of games more deserving of my time than this one? 

Well, yes, probably. For a start, Wuthering Waves is far more nuanced, sophisticated and aesthetically satisfying and don't I keep going on about how good the story is there? That game is getting a huge content drop in a few days and I haven't even started the storyline from the last one yet.

So, why am I playing CoA instead of WW? I don't think there's a very straightforward answer to that. It's new, of course, which always helps. It's linear and straightforward, which could be a problem later on but which, at the start, makes the game very accessible and easy to follow. 

It's pretty to look at at and while the visual style says anime, the writing feels a lot like a good old Saturday morning cartoon series. The story skips along cheerily and the characters are broadly drawn but with plenty of personality. 

The witch of the mines. She's a baddie. Or is she?

Structurally, there's just enough choice to make it feel as though you have some agency but really it's a straight through-line you're happy to follow. Everything progresses through a series of "dungeons" that a helpful bot teleports you to on request. There's no traveling as such but you can wander around the fairly large and very attractive non-combat areas to get a sense that you're somewhere with substance.

I'm not entirely sure that there isn't some kind of open-world element to the game, anyway. I was wandering around the city the other day, when I bumped into a zone line that popped up a warning about the next area being some kind of combat-enabled area. It made it sound as if there was an open-world area beyond, where PvP might happen, but I was too chicken to go through and find out. 

I could google it but for the moment I'm in that honeymoon phase, where I want everything to surprise me, so I haven't. That's always a sign of a well-designed game and CoA is nothing if not well-designed.

The most significant reason I find myself wanting to log into this game at the moment, rather than any of the dozen or more others I could be playing, is the torrent of new systems and mechanics that just keep on coming. This is true of most games and accounts for a great deal of the excitement and enthusiasm I have for starting over in new ones all the time. 

Classic example; the game told me how to change my appearance and I did but then I still looked the same after. Now I have to figure out how it works, which is my idea of a good time.

It's absolutely an Explorer Archetype thing and if there was ever any doubt that that's my segment of the pie chart, this blog, with its never-ending drip-feed of First Impressions and game reports from the early and mid-levels of games I never go on to play at endgame, proves it. 

I'm sure the exact same aspects of this and many other games, the long introductions where you learn how the game works and what you have to do to survive and prosper in the world that's being revealed, are the very parts that drive so many new players to give up and log out, never to return. A lot of people just want to get on and play the damn game, not fiddle-faddle about with ninety-seven different ways to do stuff they don't care about and never will but for me it's like unwrapping a huge pile of presents under the tree.

And modern F2P titles really do go nuts with the things they give you to do. After a while it does indeed become too much and I'm noticing almost as many burnout stories cropping up in blog posts over there being just too damn many things to do in games these days as there used to be about how much of our lives had to be given over to getting to the point where we could do anything much at all.

The big difference I see between the two eras is that for the most part, the filler developers use to keep us busy these days is far more avoidable than it used to be. The open-world RPGs that are broadly replacing MMOs scarcely seem to respect our time any more than EverQuest or the rest ever did but they also seem a lot more amenable to casual play. You can spend a ton of time and money on them, sure, but you can entertain yourself very nicely in short bursts for free, too.

Building up your vinyl collection: A lot cheaper here than in real life.

How long that will persist in Crystal of Atlan I'm not so sure. One of the main reasons I'm so positive about Wuthering Waves is that so far it's proved not just possible but quite easy to keep up with the main storyline simply by... playing through the main storyline. 

Unlike Genshin Impact, generally acknowledged as the founder of and trend-setter for the genre, a game I liked but had to give up after a few weeks because the fights just got too hard, or even Noah's Heart, where I lasted a lot longer but eventually fell off the main story for the same reason, combat in storyline instances in Wuthering Waves has actually gotten easier as time's gone on. I don't know how long that can last, especially given that the whole business model presumably relies on players wanting to get the latest Resonators for some practical purpose, not just to fill out their collections, but I'm very much there for it so long as it does.

In Crystal of Atlan, though, I can already see the fights becoming more challenging and requiring more skill and I'm not even out of the introductory phase just yet. I wouldn't say I was still in the tutorial but the lessons are still coming even though the story is fully engaged. 

NuVerse make a big thing of how their game isn't a Gacha but of course it is. The swerve is that you don't roll for characters to do the fighting for you, so in that respect I do think it's quite likely the impact of increased difficulty will fall on players' skill instead of  their wallets. 

I know it looks like one but that's not a skill tree. It's the gear progression table and there's a screen like that for every slot on the paper-doll. I mean... why??

Unfortunately for me, I don't have much in the way of skill when it comes to action RPGs and perhaps worse I have a very low tolerance indeed for skill trees, builds and all that kind of nonsense. I never liked it much but the longer I've had to put up with it, the more I'm beginning to see it in much the same way other players see slow leveling or lengthy travel or long blocks of quest text or endless cut scenes: an annoying waste of my time that I should be able to click through or that the game should just take over and do for me.

It's more than just a lack of interest or enthusiasm on my part. I actively dislike having to read skill descriptions and I really, really hate having to try and figure out which one has synergy with which other one. I just want to hit stuff with a big stick or shoot it with a gun and leave it at that. 

So long as I can get away with button-mashing I'll put up with it but once I have to start thinkiong about sequences and putting combos together it all starts to become work. And if I'm going to do work, I either want to get paid for it or have something solid to show for it at the end. 

Beating a boss, just so I can go on to beat the next boss, doesn't motivate me in the same way painting the kitchen wall does. I really don't want to paint the kitchen wall either but at least when I've done it I have a better-looking kitchen and the comfortable knowledge that I won't have to do it again for a few years.

Never mix it with the maid.

Given the way Crystal of Atlan is constructed, I would imagine my time with it will be short for that reason alone. I'm guessing that when the time comes that I can't beat a boss in a storyline dungeon my ability to progress will be put on hold until I figure out how to do it, which I won't because I'll just stop and play something else instead.

Or maybe that won't happen. Maybe I'm negatively projecting. Maybe the devs have already thought about that. There was this odd thing the other day when I was playing...

I was right in the middle of a very hectic fight in a dungeon when Beryl came bouncing in, barking and jumping up at me and instead of carrying on with the fight I stopped and took her out to play. When I came back, my character had died (I literally abandoned her in the middle of a fight so it would have been very odd if she hadn't.).

It was the first time I'd died in the game so I wasn't sure what would happen but I figured at least I'd have to start the instance over from the last save point. Instead, I just ended up back at the questgiver, who congratulated me on a job well done, as though I'd finished the whole dungeon, and the story just carried on. I haven't deliberately gotten myself killed again to test it but wouldn't it be nice if the game just patted you on the head every time you died and gave you a pass to the next stage?

Spoiler: She's down but she's not going to stay down.

Yeah, I doubt that's going to happen. I think the way it's supposed to go is that you start engaging with all the many improvement and enhancement mechanics they've been introuducing you to over the first twenty-five levels and learn to git gud.

I've been shown how to upgrade my armor with spare parts I can get by dis-assembling my old stuff. I've been shown how to socket circuits to make it more powerful. I've been shown how to spend points in the many talent trees. I've been tested to see which Class specialization I'd like to take up and given a whole new skill tree for that. 

I've been introduced to the idea of hiring pets to help me. Pets who have their own stats and skill trees and the whole shebang. You can collect pets and you can have two up at once. And then there are the "cosmetic" clothes, the outfits and what-not. Those turn out to have stats, too. And you can collect those as well. At least they don't seem to have talent trees.

Hmm. "Fleets"? I seem to have missed that one...

It's early days and there's a lot I don't understand yet but it does appear to me that the whole "We don't do Gacha" thing falls apart quite fast when you spot that both pets and costumes, for both of which there most definitely is a gacha mechanic, directly affect your combat-worthiness. Not that I care, since I won't be paying for pulls, but it does seem a tad shifty.

Then again, maybe if you can actually play the game - if you have the knowledge and motivation to figure out a good build and the speed and dexterity to use it effectively - the added boost from pets and cosmetics is just icing on the I Know What I'm Doing cake.

I don't know what I'm doing and I'm not afraid to admit it. But I'm having plenty of fun all the same. We'll see how long that lasts.