Blue Protocol: Star Resonance - What Were You Expecting?

I managed to find about another hour and a half for Blue Protocol: Star Resonance today, in-between making mugs of tea for the heating engineers and taking Beryl out for long walks to stop her freaking out because she wasn't allowed to roam around the house like she usually does. (We live on a busy main road and builders and allied tradesmen can't be relied on to keep gates closed.)

My character, who now has a name: Floradelle. As I suspected, there's a plot point where it becomes apparent she has no idea who she is and has to come up with something for people to call her. It's one of the most hackneyed of RPG tropes but handled here rather amusingly, I thought. Certainly not done to death, as it often is.

When I logged out she'd just dinged Level 6. Not there are any dings when you level up in this game. It's barely noticeable, in fact. I do miss the good old dings of yore.

She's finished the opening stage of the main questline, up to the part where the first minor troublemaker is revealed and defeated. While it's still very early days, I feel I'm already in a position to address some of the main criticisms of the game, things that have seen it review-bombed on Steam, although I note it has now risen to the relative glories of "Mixed" from about six thousand reviews, which is at least an improvement on yesterday's "Mostly Negative".

 

Firstly, that "There's only one server and it's in China" claim. If there's really only one server, it must be a hell of a big one because as I type this, more than fifty thousand people are playing the game on Steam and Steam isn't the only place you can play it. Peak concurrency on Steam is over 90k, too, so I'm assuming what people mean is that all the available servers are in China, not that there's really just one of them.

That said, at no point do you have to choose a server, so it's a bit of a moot point. Server cluster or single server, it's all the same if the tech is up to it. 

The issue in any case isn't over whether there's one superginormous megaserver or a farm of linked smaller servers pretending to be one. It's about ping, latency and playability.

And they're all fine. From here in the UK, anyway. I experienced absolutely no lag whatsoever at any point, no delayed animations, no rubber-banding, no slow responses to any kind of input. I didn't check my ping but my play experience was indistinguishable from any MMORPG I play on EU or US servers. And frankly it was a lot better than some. On this evidence Standing Stone would do well to move their servers to China. (Yes, I know that's not actually the problem there.)

I did lose contact with the server once but that happens to me with many games. I suspect it has a lot more to do with the thirty year-old fiber optic cabling coming into the house than anything at the other end. And anyway, connection was re-established in moments and everything continued as before.

 

Next, auto-battling. What are people complaining about? Yes, it exists but it's off by default. Are they switching it on just so they can complain about it? (I imagine that's exactly what's happening.)

I've been reading about auto-battle in mobile ports for ages but so far I can't remember playing any that had it. I wish they did. I'd love to be able to let the game deal with all those open-world Tacet Discords in Wuthering Waves, for example.

I was positively excited to try the feature out in BP:SR.  When I arrived at my first combat moment in the game, something that's a surprisingly long time coming, I waited to see what would happen. Nothing did. I had to fight the damn mob myself like some kind of peasant!

After it was dead, I ferreted around in the settings to find the keybind (It's "H".) and toggled auto-battling on. From then until when I logged out, I happily let the game do my work for me as I cackled with glee. You do have to remember to toggle it off again when you're done or else your character will just charge from mob to mob in a never-ending killing spree but I even liked that part. It made me feel like I had some agency, without needing to make an effort, which is pretty much perfect gameplay from my perspective.

I doubt auto-battling is going to cut it in whatever passes for difficult group content in this game but since I'm extremely unlikely ever to engage in any of that, why would I care? What I can say is that not having to do much of my own button-pressing as I run around doing pointless tasks for lazy NPCs is likely to lead to me playing the game for longer. It's automating out the bit of the game I look forward to the least so why would I complain?

 

I will be using both auto-battling and auto-pathing (Which I forgot was in the game until I wrote this paragraph and now wish I'd been using all along.) whenever I feel like it with no shame whatsoever. Conversely, if I'm in the mood to do my own running and fighting, as I sometimes am, I'll do them. This game gives me the choice and I cannot for the life of me see why anyone would claim that's a Bad Thing, let alone rant about it in a review. (Erm... didn't you just do exactly that yourself, only in reverse?)

Speaking of doing dumb quests for dumb NPCs, that's another of the sticks being used to beat the game. When I was skimming the Steam reviews yesterday I saw several negative comments about how boring the quests were and how the cut scenes weren't worth watching. Related complaints involved poor translations and completely untranslated voice acting.

Based on my experience so far (Which is about four or five times longer than that of many of the people making those comments, many of whom had spent barely half an hour in the game.) only one of those observations is true. There is no English dub for the Chinese voice acting. 

That's not at all unusual in imported MMORPGs and I'm in two minds about whether it's a problem or not. Voice acting is a bit of a double-edged sword in that, when done well, it does add hugely to both immersion and storytelling, but when done badly (Or even averagely.) it's often more annoying than not having it at all. 

And even good voice acting slows everything down. I can read the text in maybe a quarter of the time it takes to listen to it. Cutting actors off mid-speech is jarring and anyway, if the acting is good, I feel I ought to keep it on and appreciate it, but even then I'm often twitching to get on with things. 

Only when the writing and the voice acting are both well above average, as for example in Wuthering Waves, does it feel like time well-spent to pay them each full attention. And as I've said numerous times, that in itself is enervating. 

Probably the main reason I play Wuthering Waves so infrequently is because the writing and voice acting are too good for what I want from that kind of video game. It's a level of quality that actually puts me off engaging with it because of the commitment it demands. I mean, if I wanted to watch a pretty good movie, I'd do that instead.

For that reason, I was actively pleased to be able to go into the settings for BP:SR and switch NPC voices off. I couldn't understand them and the audio was carrying on long after I'd finished reading the text, so it seemed like the obvious choice. I'd rate the lack of English voices as at worst a neutral factor but probably a positive for the game as a whole. I kind of hope they never add them although by my own previous argument I guess I have to accept that it would be better to have the option.

How about the text, though? Is it badly translated? And those quests. Are they boring? The cut scenes, too. Is the only sensible choice to skip them?

No, no and no. 

The dialog is well-translated, albeit with that odd lilt that's become so very familiar. It's idiomatic and grammatically correct and yet it still somehow has a slight off-kilter feel to it. And I like that. It's like hearing someone speak excellent English, only with a very slight, pleasant accent. What's the problem?

As for content, the quests are no more boring than any other quest in any other game of this stripe and considerably less boring than many. So far it's all been very standard stuff, although starting with the equivalent of half a dozen quests of the type you'd normally find in an in-game holiday is a brave opening move. 

In fact, the first half-hour of the game proper is a holiday event, to all intents and purposes. I'm guessing that quite a bit of BP:SR is going to revolve around non-combat activities so it makes sense to introduce that style of gameplay early. I certainly enjoyed it.

When the storyline does move on to killing mobs, first some harmless deer-creatures just outside the city and then some corrupted creatures and the aforementioned bad guy responsible for creating them, the quests involved are precisely what you'd expect. They're wholly unoriginal and they very definitely aren't going to win any prizes.

But who would expect anything else? The dialog is sprightly and sparkling, the NPCs are quirky and
amusing, the stakes are low, the action is straightforward and we all had a jolly good time. Isn't that the what we're here for? It's a light-hearted video game, designed to be played in short bursts on a mobile phone, now also made available for the convenience and pleasure of PC users. What were you expecting?

I liked the quests. I liked the NPCs. I liked the dialog. I liked the story. I am clearly very easy to please and glad of it, too. So much better than the other way around.

As for the cut-scenes, there weren't many but they were fine. I didn't skip any nor feel the need to. You'd need to be a lot more impatient than I am to find them too tedious to sit through. Or have much higher cultural and aesthetic standards, I suppose. In which case, I'd politely ask you what the hell you thought you were doing when you downloaded this game.

And there we have it. The main reasons I've seen for rubbishing Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, all comprehensively rubbished themselves. 

It's not going to win any awards. It's not going to change the medium or even the genre. It's not going to challenge you or inspire you or bring you to some sort of emotional catharsis. If any of that is what you're looking for, there are plenty of other games that would suit you better.

This one is merely capable of entertaining and amusing in the moment, which is a lot more than nothing. It's also pretty to look at, fun to play and it has a welcome feel-good attitude. If that's what you want, you could do worse. I know I have.

More when I know more, which might not be long because I'm quite keen to keep on playing.