How's Blue Protocol: Star Resonance going then? That's what your all asking, isn't it? Isn't it? Well, I'm going to tell you anyway.
It's going pretty well as far as I can make out. As I write, at just before nine in the morning, UK time, on a Sunday, there are almost forty-six thousand people playing on Steam (Sixty-two thousand as I edit this at five PM.) from an all-time peak of just under eighty thousand. It's clearly holding an audience for the time being. Recent history for just about all MMORPGs released on Steam in the last couple of years suggests another month will see a huge fall-off in numbers but maybe this will be the sticky exception to that unfortunate trend.
At this point, I was going to make a comparison with Crystal of Atlan, a somewhat similar game that launched back at the beginning of summer and which I was playing quite regularly, until suddenly I wasn't. Unfortunately, the Steam chart for that game isn't working. It brings up an "Internal Server Error", something I've never seen before.
And guess why that is. I just figured it out. Crystal of Atlan isn't on Steam! I've been playing it through it's own standalone launcher for which I have a desktop icon. But I have lots of desktop icons for Steam games too so that's easy to forgive. I'm so used to everything I play being on Steam I just assume that's where everything that's not really old is going, even if I'm clicking my desktop to get there.
So how if it's not on Steam, how come the Steam chart even recognizes Crystal of Atlan to give me the error message? Shouldn't it just be telling me it doesn't exist? That turns out to be because CoA is coming to Steam in just over two weeks, on the 30 October. I don't know if it's going to be possible to link an existing account to Steam when it happens but I hope so. I might start playing again then.
Let's get back to BP:SR. That's what we're here for, after all. The numbers look good. How about the reviews? Those were very bad for a while. Have they improved?
Yep. A lot. The overall rating is "Mixed" now from a shade under five thousand reviews, of which 48% are positive. That's not so much mixed as polarized. It's too soon for there to be a "Recent" filter - all the reviews are "recent", the game not having been out for a week yet - but the selection of new reviews highlighted on the main page seem far less hysterical, whether they recommend the game or not.
It would seem logical that all the pile-ons who never planned on playing the game, the ones who only wanted to have a bit of cruel fun poking it with a stick, have moved on to the next target, leaving mostly people who actually want to give the game a fair shake. And most of those players are saying things like "It's pretty fun for what it is: a casual oriented F2P anime MMO" and "Free to play anime mmo with gatch. Not bad for what it is."
Even the negative reviews are far more balanced now, often making some positive points before concluding the game isn't for them. There's praise for the visuals, the cosmetics, the world-building, the characters and even, in a minority of cases, the gameplay and combat. The main issues people can't seem to get over are the time-gating, the myriad currencies and the general mobile free-to-playness of the whole shebang.
Which is fair. Both the negatives and the positives are in harmony there. It's a port of a Chinese F2P mobile MMO that's had some, but not a lot, of work done to fit it for a PC audience. If you're cool with that, then BP:SR is a decent game. If you're not, it's annoying and not worth your time. Seems reasonable.
There was one review that really stood out for me, though. It's very short. I'll quote it in full.
"Really boring game I ever played. Just more talk than action anything. This game really not interesting if just more talk and no action."
I totally see where the writer is coming from, although I disagree strongly with their conclusion. I have just over three and a half hours played now and I would estimate no more than ten or fifteen minutes of that has been spent fighting mobs or bosses. An action MMO it is not.
Travel, which often bulks out the played time in any kind of open world game, isn't taking up the slack either. There's the usual amount of running about but the distances involved are very small. Frequently, the next person you need to speak to is standing right across the street from where you are. New locations you have to visit are often less than fifty yards away. There are teleport points everywhere but as yet it hasn't even been worth using them.
No, almost all of my three and a half hours has been spent either talking to NPCs or listening to them talk to each other. There are some proper, animated cut scenes but far more of those tableaus where you see all the characters standing in the foreground having long conversations to which you are occasionally invited to contribute.
"More talk than action" is a very accurate description of the gameplay so far. Whether you find that boring or entertaining will be entirely down to your personal preferences. Personally, I've been enjoying it quite a bit. It's not great literature, even by gaming standards, but it's witty in places, light-hearted and cheerful and it's largely been a pleasure letting it all drift past as I watch and read.
I see from some of the other reviews that the "end game" involves a lot of repeated dungeon-running, for which you need energy of some kind as is the norm in these games. That's why people are complaining about the time-gating. I don't know how long it takes to get to that point, although if people are complaining about it already it can't be very long. I've seen five hours mentioned although that seems very fast to complete a full main story quest.
It's very likely my experience is going to be the reverse of what the commenter I quoted above was complaining about. I imagine I'll find the part when the talk stops and the action begins to be the boring bit. I certainly won't be running any dungeons more than once or twice, that's for sure. It's more likely I won't set foot in them at all unless the story demands it and even then they'd better be easy or I'll be off.
I am clearly not the real target market for the games I enjoy, which is a bit weird when I think about it. It's not just that I'm too old for them, although obviously I am. I completed a survey for the game last night and the upper age limit was 36+. I was older than that when I started playing online games, back in the 90s!
I tend to like the parts of these games I suspect the intended audience would prefer weren't there at all. The pointless busy-work of the side quests, the derivitive and poorly-writen storylines, the unecessary cross-country travel, the myriad crafting mats I pick up and then leave in storage and never use...
And I like seeing the sights and taking holiday snaps with the quirky in-game cameras. BP:SR has one of those and it's quite good although I haven't quite figured out exactly how all the controls work quite yet. I'm having fun playing around with them though. I'll be trying the Selfie option next so there's something to look forward to.
Another thing I've seen plenty of complaints about are the many currencies the game uses. Someone on Steam made a handy list:
Rose Orb
Rose Orb (Bound)
Luno
Luno (Bound)
Meowlux Premium Card
Meow Coin
Meowlux Vault Card
Meowlux Wish Coin
Homestead Coins
Friendship Points
Honor Coin
Will Wish Coin
Asteria Reputation
Season 1 Points (SRP)
Silver Star Badge
My reaction on seeing it? You call that a lot?? Also, you think it's just imported mobile F2P games that do this?? Think again, pal!
Here's a link to the wiki page listing all the EverQuest II currencies. There are sixty-seven of them and I'm not convinced that list is complete. And in case you're thinking, well EQII is a F2P game too, here's an article PC Gamer ran earlier this year about the five hundred (!) currencies that you might come across in World of Warcraft.
So far I've only seen two currencies in BP:SR, Luno and Rose Orb, both Bound, I think. It hardly seems like something worth calling the game out for.
I've been having fun. I'm looking forward to getting back to... erm, what's the world called again... ah, yes, Regnus, that's it. (Had to look it up...) Levels come very fast, which is nice, although it also suggests the leveling process is short and that "end game" (Which I keep putting in quotes because if people are in it a matter of hours or even days from launch, it probably ought just to be called "the game".) is going to arrive all too soon.
Levels come so fast I can't keep up. I believe I dinged Level 20 just before I logged out last night. I have a ton of skills and talents and other stuff to upgrade that I've been trying to ignore because to me that's the boring part. Fortunately I noticed right at the end that there's an auto-upgrade option for at least some of it, something I will most definitely be using.
Much more exciting than stats and skills are the mounts and accessories I've been getting. So far I've received three mounts. One, a boarlet, is from the storyline but it's the slowest and I haven't tried it yet. There's a wolf which I think is a pre-registration reward and a bunny that comes from one or other of the many "Events", by which they mostly mean log-in and attendance rewards. I didn't notice which of them it was. I just clicked Claim and it appeared.
The Wolf and the Bunny are identical in speed and they both look great. I'm swapping between them at the moment although the rabbit has the edge due to looking goofier.
As for cosmetics, so far I've received a bizarre monocle, a much nicer pair of spectacles, some headphones, a full set of street clothes and a leaf for my character to hold in her mouth like some kind of... well, I was going to say yokel but really, who does walk around with a leaf sticking out of their mouth? I'm pretty sure I've never seen anything like it in a game before, so it is at least original.
This, of course, is exactly what I want from a game like this and so far I'm getting it in spades so I'm happy. How long it's going to last is anyone's guess but I'm riding the train until runs into the aforementioned "end game" buffers.
Or until I get distracted by the next shiny, new toy and wander off, never to return, which seems to be who I am these days.
Could be worse.
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