My first post on Crystal of Atlan got ten times the usual page views, so I thought I'd do another. I'm nothing if not opportunistic. Also, I did play again yesterday, for only the second time, so I have a few screenshots and a couple of things to say about it.
[Editor's Note: This will not, in fact, be a post about Crystal of Atlan. That post has been re-scheduled. Instead, this will be a post in which Crystal of Atlan appears only as an illustrative example in an otherwise unrelated topic. Actual Crystal of Atlan fans may wish to skip this and wait for the next one, when there may actually be some mention of the game itself. We can only hope...]
As far as I can tell, Crystal of Atlan does not have a dedicated screenshot function. I've been all through the keybinds and there's no sign of one. It's possible that there's one of those nifty in-game virtual cameras that pop up in many similar games and that you have to reach a certain level or do a particular quest to get it but I doubt it. I've googled to check that and not been able to find anything.
[Edit: Theree is indeed an in-game camera function. It's accessed via the "H" key by default but the game didn't tell me about it until I dinged Level 20. More about that another day.]
That doesn't get you a nice, clean screen suitable for use on a blog page, though. For that you need to be able to remove the UI. Almost all games offer that facility, usually buried somewhere deep in the settings, but I've fine-tooth combed my way through every tab in CoA and I can't see a way to do it.
Never mind, though, eh? We don't need to do all that grunt work ourselves these days, do we? We have good old AI to do it for us!
I was having a little chat about that very topic with Nimgimli in the comments to yesterday's post, where I was saying that my experience using Google's Gemini as a research assistant wasn't giving me much confidence. For one thing, I always have to check Gemini's work. It can't be trusted to operate without close supervision, something even Google admit by appending the caveat "AI responses may include mistakes." to every response.
That's fine as far as it goes, for now at least , although if AI Search is really going to take over from the regular kind, it's going to have take those training-wheels off some day. And I guess I could live with it if the responses were "mostly right" but at the moment I'm not sure they're even hitting that minimal threshold for competency.
I mentioned in yesterday's post that Gemini confidently told me the current Overseer Season in EverQuest II is Season 6, when in fact it's Season 7. Unfortunately, I didn't take a screenshot of that result and today when I asked again, Gemini gave me the correct answer, so now I'm wondering if it had something to do with the way I phrased the question.
Even if we give Gemini a pass on that one, it can't wriggle out of today's mistake. As I was starting to write about the lack of screenshot and/or remove UI functions in Crystal of Atlan, I thought I probably ought to just fact-check myself, so I asked Google. Specifically, I typed "crystal of atlan screenshot hide UI" into Google Search.
These days, as I'm sure everyone has noticed, the actual search results are frequently prefaced by an "AI Overview" which Gemini provides whether you've asked for it or not. And now, because this is basically a live blogging event, I've just asked myself "I wonder if you can disable that?" so I asked Google and got a reply from Gemini, which felt a bit like asking a condemned man to knot his own noose.
It seems we're stuck with the AI Overview whether we want it or not, although there are "workarounds" to prevent anyone who really doesn't want it from having to see it. Personally, I quite like it, even if I trust it to give me accurate information about as much as I'd trust that guy down the pub who thinks he knows the answer to everything.
Anyway, getting back to the point, for today's post I typed that simple inquiry into Google Search and got a very helpful reply from Gemini:
Ah, that's good then! So there is a way to hide the UI! Still, better check it to be sure, I guess.
I logged in to Crystal of Atlan, which doesn't take long, and gave it a try. And guess what?
Ah, you're ahead of me. Yep. Doesn't work.
There's a good reason for that. It's because NumPad+ is how you hide the UI when you take a screenshot in Steam. Not in Crystal of Atlan.
It's useful information in itself, of course. I actually didn't know you could do that in Steam and it's going to come in very handy, so thanks, Gemini, for bringing it to my attention.
It is not, however, an accurate answer to the question I asked you. It might have been, if Crystal of Atlan was on Steam, but it's not.
Or is it? Again, I was pretty positive it wasn't because if it was, that's where I'd be playing it and I'm not, but I thought I'd better do my due diligence and check anyway. So I asked Google Search "is "Crystal of Atlan" on Steam?" and Gemini confidently told me it was.
Look! There it is in black and white. Highlighted in blue, even. And with a link to the right that seems to confirm it. I mean, that link has the words "Crystal of Atlan" "Launches" and "Steam" right there in the title, right?
Well, yes it does. Only, if you click through, you'll find that link goes to the IGN feed on Steam's News Hub, which is a basically a way of reading IGN without having to leave Steam. I didn't even know it existed so, once again, thanks to Gemini for bringing some useful information to my attention. Pity it wasn't an accurate answer to the question I asked but there we go...
You can, of course, add Crystal of Atlan to your Steam Library, just like you can add any game. It's apparently not all that easy to get it to work that way - there's a detailed guide in the description for this YouTube video on how to do it if you're thinking of trying - and I guess the NumPad+ thing might work then...
Still not enough to give Gemini a passing grade, though, is it? And it's very clear that isn't what the AI meant. If it was, I'm sure it wouldn't have opened with "Yes. "Crystal of Atlan" is available on Steam."
But wait! Hang on a moment! What about the other links the AI Overview provides to back up its erroneous assertion? One goes to somewhere that wants to sell you a key for a F2P game, which is nice money if you can get it. The other goes to the very same MMOBomb news item I linked in my First Impressions post.
It says right at the top "The magicpunk game will be available on iOS, Android, PC, and PlayStation." No mention of Steam.
Except... er... look a little lower down, just below the buff guy with his shirt off... "Upcoming free-to-play action MMORPG Crystal of Atlan is launching on May 28 across iOS, Android, Steam, Epic Games Store, and PlayStation 5. " My bold, obviously.
At least Gemini wasn't the only one to get it wrong, then. And who knows? Maybe COA is on Steam after all. I guess the only way to be sure is to log into Steam and try to find it...
Nope. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Not on Steam no matter what anyone tells you, AI or otherwise.
All of which, I guess, proves that you can't trust anything you read on the internet. But we all knew that already, right? Whether AI is going to make that truism even more true than it's always been is something I guess we're just going to have to wait and see. My bet is it won't make a lot of difference in the long run, although it might make quite a difference to anyone who chooses to rely on AI Search right now.
As I was saying to Nimgimli in the comments, my experience of using AI as a source of information has not been encouraging and still isn't. I love what it can do in the creative fields but as a way of getting accurate information faster than before, it's not there yet, not even nearly.
The above is fairly representative of most of the results I get to the kind of questions I ask, but then most of the topics I search on are game-related. It's entirely possible that the available pool of knowledge on that topic from which it's having to draw is already quite badly polluted.
It's not like we haven't all complained about finding old, inaccurate or just plain fanciful "facts" about the games we play when we go looking for tips or hints or walk-throughs. There's a lot of hand-wringing going on right now over the ouroboros effect as AIs feed on false information provided by other AIs but the term "Garbage In, Garbage Out" predates the AI revolution by decades, so it's not like humans weren't already doing a pretty good job of that on their own.
For the time being, I think I'll carry on checking and double-checking everything AI tells me. True facts are hard to come by, these days, from any source, AI or human.
Post Script:
Because I just can't leave well alone, I carried on fiddling about with AI Overview and got this even more authoritative reply to my query "crystal of atlan add to steam", which I believe explains why Gemini is so adamant that the game is on Steam after all.
OK this is fun. I don't use the AI Overview, I go to https://www.google.com/aimode which I think might use a more current model/engine/whatever
ReplyDeleteWhen I put in "crystal of atlan screenshot hide UI" I get a page that starts with:
"This tool cannot confirm how to hide the UI for screenshots in Crystal of Atlan because the information is not available. However, here are some general approaches based on how other games handle this:"
And then offers a list of generic ways to look for a remove screenshot function while not promising any of them will work.
What is more alarming to me is that you'll get different results using the standard google search. When I went to google.com to search using the same phrase I got:
"The most recent information available on Crystal of Atlan suggests that the option to hide the UI for screenshots might be buried within the game's settings. One source indicates they found this option by looking through the settings, though it's unclear if it's a dedicated UI hiding feature or if it's part of another setting. "
So that search is still wrong but I guess hedges its bets some?
Now all that said, both versions got the "Is it available on Steam" wrong, same as happened with you. But in this case I guess it's a case of garbage in, garbage out.
perplexity.ai also got this wrong...unless you tell it to use Social Media sources and not Web Sources (something you can do on Perplexity) then it gets it right:
"Availability of Crystal of Atlan on Steam
Crystal of Atlan is not officially available on Steam as of June 2025."
CoPilot gets it right:
"No, Crystal of Atlan is not currently available on Steam. If you're looking to play it on PC, you can download it from the Epic Games Store or directly from the developer's website. There's a possibility it might come to Steam in the future, as publishing rights for Western countries are shifting to Skystone in June 2025, and Skystone has a history of bringing games to Steam.
If you still want to launch it through Steam, you can manually add it as a non-Steam game to your library. Let me know if you need help with that!"
So yup, there certainly is still work to do, but in the defense of AI the confusion around whether it is on Steam or not seems to stem from various sources giving out the wrong info.
Also, sorry for the wall of text, I just find all of this fascinating!
Please wall-of-text away as much as you like! I also find it fascinating, as must be obvious from how often I write about it. When I was actively experimenting with AI as a research assistant, I used to run the same queries through several of them but now I'm just seeing the Overview results at the top of most (Although by no means every) search, whether I want to or not. I do find it useful-ish but you really can't trust it even on simple things.
DeleteIt's plain from the example in the post that it's doing some kind of precis of the search results themselves, with some kind of supposed analysis to pull out the most relevant results, but it doesn't do a very good or even consistent job of it. It really does seem like a not very thorough intern, who only half pays attention to the brief and stops as soon as they have something that looks like it might be good enough.
I haven't tried Co-Pilot but I wouldn't be surprised if it's more accurate than anything powered by Gemini. I do prefer Gemini of all of them for creative work but it's never been the best at coming back with accurate information from a search. It is worrying that all of them come upwith different answers, which they always have done but maybe more worrying still that any of them can be relied on to give inconsistent answers depending on how you phrase the query. In fact, the really worrying thing about all of it is not how mechanical they are but how disturbingly human they can be.
Also, I just checked the AI Mode link and that was very interesting. It says "AI Mode expands what AI Overviews can do with more advanced reasoning and ways of interacting. It divides your question into subtopics and searches for each one simultaneously." Also the explanation of how it works goes into some length on why it may not be correct, noting that "For example, in some cases AI Mode may misinterpret web content or miss context", to which my immediate response was "No shit, Sherlock!" I may have to look into AI Mode further...
you _can_ disable the annoying AI results (and the ads) in Google search. You append "udm=14" to each search term (or make a search shortcut with that as part of the URL) and you won't see the AI results or the ads. Took me a little while to work out _how_ to append that to each search term, but it does work.
ReplyDelete