The Sun Comes Up On Another Vision Of The Past

Stars Reach isn't the only game in alpha (Sorry... pre-alpha...) running lengthy testing sessions just now. Monsters & Memories is also ramping up towards reaching some kind of always-on state later in the year - or perhaps early next year - by keeping the servers up for longer and longer periods.

There's a "Community Alpha Test" on right now. It started on Sunday and it runs through this coming weekend. There's another one, even longer, due in November.

I like Monsters&Memories. I like their testing program, too, it seems. This is the ninth time I've posted about the game and eight of those posts are me talking about what I did during a test. 

It's a curious contrast with Stars Reach where, enthusiastic as I may have been at the beginning, that  enthusiasm has waned, along with my interest, until it feels like only a misplaced sense of duty and the hope of finding something to fill a blog post keeps me logging in at all. Conversely, while I probably don't have any more played hours in Monsters&Memories than in Stars Reach, whenever the opportunity arises to take another look at M&M, I find myself getting almost excited at the prospect.

Not that I've been taking huge advantage of the longer tests in either game. I couldn't manage even a full hour in Stars Reach the other day and I didn't time it but I think my Monsters&Memories session yesterday evening came up a little shy of two hours.I really enjoyed it, though, and I hope to get one or two more sessions in before the servers close down on Sunday. 

It definitely helped that after I'd downloaded the latest launcher and patched up the game to the current version, my character from last time was still there, waiting for me. As I was saying in the feedback I sent to Playable Worlds, even during a testing phase, some sort of continuity is vital to keep players engaged. Well, to keep me engaged, anyway.

Not that it would have made any material difference if I'd had to re-roll and start from scratch. My character from last time hadn't even finished Level One. All she'd done was wander around the overwhelmingly huge city, getting constantly and repeatedly lost, trying to find the two or three NPCs needed for the one or two quests she had, before taking equally long to find the city gates so she could go out into the newbie yard and get killed almost immediately by a large beetle.

That, with only a few small variations, describes all my experiences with Monsters&Memories in every test so far. I make a character or pick up where I left off with the last one. I jog endlessly through the streets, up the countless steps and stairways, in and out of the innumerable buildings. round and round and round, sometimes with no goal in mind at all, sometimes hoping I might somehow stumble across some specific named NPC. 

It's usually dark. There's never any kind of map. Even in the city there are things that want to kill you. Outside the gates, on the sands, if you ever find out how to get there, nothing awaits you but darkness and death.

And yet it's somehow quite compulsive. Partly, the game just looks so good. I've seen reviews that say otherwise and it's certainly a low-detail, low-texture environment but the highly stylized design is effective and the lighting is really excellent. Every time I find myself taking lots of screenshots, few of which do the visuals I'm seeing in the game justice. Atmospheric lighting effects are notoriously hard to capture in stills.

At Level  One, gameplay is literally identical to EverQuest circa the turn of the millennium, which is hardly surprising. As I say every time I write about M&M, it basically is Classic EverQuest. 

This time, though, I managed to get further with the questing than ever before and it occurred to me that the exact period it's re-creating has to be a little past "Classic". I'd peg it around the time low-level armor and weapon quests were added, a process that began in 2002. Before that you wore cloth drops from orc pawns and liked it.

The extent to which the whole things feels just like playing EQ back then is astonishing. The mobs are the same. The spells have the same names. Some even have the same visual effects. 

You have to collect your quest drops in a six-slot bag and "combine" them into a new, separate "bag" that's actually a quest item. Then you hand it in by picking it up on your mouse pointer and dropping it onto the receiving NPC.It doesn't get much more old school than that.

Whether anyone under 35 would ever want to do any of it seems both highly unlikely and also quite beside the point. This is an old game for old people. 

Or is it? I read something quite interesting during Blaugust, where someone was saying the decades-long fetish for ever-better graphics is now washing up against the rocks of a generation raised on the likes of Minecraft and Roblox, games where everything looks like its made out of a load of brightly-colored blocks and no-one cares. Not to mention Old School Runescape.

And what do I know about the quest methodologies in those games, assuming they even exist there? Maybe combining a bunch of scorched skeleton bones in a burlap sack by pressing a big button marked COMBINE feels perfectly normal to people under 20 now. 

I'd bet the rate of progress doesn't though. Boy, is it ever slow! 

Or is it? These assumptions need to be challenged!

It took a while but it did finally occur to me last night that maybe I might be leveling up faster if I spent more of my time actually killing things and less of it running around the city. In EverQuest in 2002 we didn't generally expect to get our XP from quests. We just ran out the city gates ten seconds after we were created and got straight down to killing rats, like any normal person would.

 I find these days - and indeed these last couple of decades - that just the existence of a linear questline is enough to make me forget everything I once knew. In game after game I step on that escalator the moment I see it and do my best to ride it to the top, all the while complaining about how on rails the whole experience has become. 

When I find myself in a game that doesn't bully, bribe or cajole me into questing for a living, which neither Monsters&Memories nor Stars Reach does, rather than congratulating the developers on their thoughtfulness and consideration in treating me with respect, as someone capable of setting my own goals and finding my own fun, what do I do? Complain the game is aimless or purposeless or not even a game at all and start bleating on about how there's no narrative structure, like some caricature of an actor asking "...but what's my motivation?"

Just fricking get out there, kill stuff and watch your numbers go up! What more motivation do you need? I tried a bit of that yesterday and it got me to Level Two. Well, that and the quest hand-in...

I don't know. It's been a long time, hasn't it? Is this what we want any more? Is it what I want?

I guess when Monsters&Memories goes live I'm going to find out. Pantheon didn't do it for me so this is probably the last hurrah of the Golden Age horde. 

It's looking promising so far.