Apologies for the expected interruption to normal posting. Predictable real life issues. Situation likely to continue, at least for a while.
Without that, Monday would have seen a post about which demos I'd chosen for the current Steam Next Fest. Unfortunately, as yet, I haven't picked any. I did have a browse through the list yesterday on Tuesday (This post having been delayed a further day due to more hospital visiting.) but I was on my laptop, sitting in a side-room at the hospital as I waited for my mother to go through various scans, so it was a bit hard to concentrate.
Fortunately for the blog, on Monday I did manage to spend some time with a demo that came out just before Next Fest, the intriguing "horse mystery" mmorpg Equinox Homecoming. I didn't quite finish the demo but Steam says I played for 86 minutes, which certainly seems like enough to form some kind of judgment.
And that judgment, to pre-empt the entire post, would be largely favorable. I really enjoyed my hour and almost-a-half with the game, which ran well, looked good and seemed like a lot of fun, at least as far as it went, which wasn't all that far.
The demo would appear to be the opening of the game, the tutorial mostly, although there doesn't seem to be anything to stop you just riding around the island, exploring, if you want. I didn't because I was mostly following the quest prompts but I did get lost a few times, wandering through the woods and it all looked very pretty.
But that's getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start where all good MMORPGs begin, with character creation. It's fairly basic as these things go. You pick a feature from a list rather than fiddle with an infinite number of sliders. But that's fine.
More than fine, actually. I was able to get a character I felt comfortable with very easily. Sliders are overrated in my opinion, especially in games where you effectively spend 95% of your time staring at the back of your character's head, although to be fair to this one, you get to see plenty of your character's face in the many cut scenes.
Once you've settled on your character's appearance and given them a name, you need to do the same for your horse. The equine appearance options are more limited but there's still a good choice. Assuming you care about what your horse looks like, of course, which it's probably safe to assume most people laying down £25 for the full game definitely will.
And so to the game itself, where one of the oddest things is that the name you gave your character never gets used in the game itself. I named my character Flora and the avatar I was looking at was definitely the one I made but every dialog, voice and text, called her Alex.
That would be fine if it was an RPG but it doesn't make a lot of sense for an MMO. It looks as though your personalized character identity applies to you as a player, in chat and when grouping (Assuming there is grouping - I didn't see or do any.) but all the player-characters are the same person for narrative purposes.
Can that be right? It does seem weird. I guess I ought to go go into the game and check... Nope. That's not right, either. It might be what happens from someone else's perspective - no-one spoke in general chat while I was testing it - but when I spoke, whatever I said was attributed to the generic "You".
Minor point, perhaps, but it does bring up the question of why Equinox Homecoming needs to be an MMORPG in the first place. The developers are adamant that's what it is, to the point where they removed the "single player" tag from the Steam description to avoid confusion.
Except it feels a lot more like a single-player game in the demo. It has a central narrative driven by quests that focus entirely on Alex, as would be typical of a solo RPG. There's no indication you can group up for these and if you could, it would make no sense. Everyone would be the same person.
In other MMOs that might not matter so much. Grouping would revolve around fighting enemies that need more than one person to defeat. Only there's no combat in this game, none at all.
Unless there are multi-person puzzles, like the ones some games have where require several people to stand on separate pressure-plates at the same time, there wouldn't be any need to group up with other players.
There are lots of races but, in the demo at least, they're all time trials. You don't compete directly with other players, just with yourself or to climb the leader board. There are guilds called Riding Clubs but what they do I have no idea. The multiplayer element to the game seems nominal at best.
I just did a little bit of mild research on all of the above points and it seems most have been contentious for a while. There are Steam threads questioning the rationale behind the naming convention and wondering if and why the game is an MMORPG.
The devs who have answered have mostly offered some variation on "Because that's how it is." There's even a suggestion from a developer that anyone who wants to play the game as a single-player game can just select an empty server and play on their own, although they don't guarantee there will always be empty servers. It makes me wonder why they have so many servers in the first place if some of them are always empty.
I've side-tracked myself a little, focusing on these odd inconsistencies, which makes it sound as though I didn't enjoy my time with the demo. The opposite is true. I thought the world looked very attractive and felt like it would be a pleasure to explore, albeit not so much of a pleasure as to make me go and do that right away.
I found the plot interesting, the writing engaging, the mechanics solid and the gameplay entertaining. I also thought the voice acting was good. Naturalistic. Convincing. Not overdone.
The plot, which as many reviews on Steam make a point of mentioning, is unusual for a horse game and probably not suitable for a very young audience, involves the central character, Alex, as she returns to the island where she grew up to try and find out what could have happened to her eccentric mother, now missing for reasons unknown.
Alex, who I would guess to be in her very late teens or possibly her very early twenties, left after a blow-out with her mom over the bizarre way they'd been living. Inconveniently, Alex runs out the door right at the moment when her mother is offering to tell her everything, which at least alerts us to the fact that there's something to be told.
Alex hasn't been back since. Until now. Oh, and let's not forget a girl has been found dead in the woods and a bunch of wild animals have been killed and mutilated, too. It's a mystery, as Toyah would say, and a spooky, disturbing one, too. It's lucky Alex's mom trained her in survival techniques by leaving her alone in the woods overnight when she was ten years old...
So, this is not exactly a cosy game where you look after your horse and ride around in some beautiful countryside, although it is that too. You need to groom and feed and care for your horse, which is how your horse levels up, because this is an MMORPG for reasons, so of course there are levels.
Also, you want to look after your horse, don't you? Otherwise why are you even here?
Except you don't have to look after your horse at all. Or rather, you do if you want your horse to level up but the game tells you not to worry if you forget or can't be bothered because not looking after your horse has no gameplay implications. Again, weird design choice.
It's clear even from the demo that Equinox Homecoming incorporates many of the standard tropes of the genre. The MMO genre, that is. I wouldn't know what the tropes of the horse riding genre would be.
There are plenty of NPCs and as usual they'd like you to go do the little jobs they don't have time for, mostly in a quid pro quo fashion, where they give you goods or services you can't afford because you seem to have come home from wherever it is you ran away to with no money. Most of those same NPCs also collect something for some reason and they're keen for you to find lots of whatever it is they're after and bring it to them for some benefit as yet undisclosed, since I didn't do it.
That employs the standard "pick stuff up off the ground" mechanic we're all familiar with - plants, flowers, feathers, all the regular litter. It leads me to suspect there may also be crafting but I didn't see any sign of it in the demo.
Once you have your horse (A loaner from your friend.) and have everything you need (Like a saddle.) and the game has made sure you know how to stay on and turn corners without falling off, it's on with the mystery. Investigation, for me at least, mostly involved following prompts. It seemed very linear but it is only the tutorial phase so I wouldn't read too much into that.
There's quite a sizeable town on the island, which I found it a lot easier to explore on foot rather than on horseback. It looked pretty good to me but there are plenty of complaints in the reviews of the demo on Steam that claim the game is made up of standard UE5 assets. Even if that's true, they've been employed effectively enough, so I don't quite get what the objection would be.
There are also complaints that the game uses generative AI, something the developers have categorically refuted. Accusing games of using AI is becoming a problem, not least because allegations often seem to rely on nothing more than someone thinking an image looks like it was done by AI. There was plenty of bad art in games before generative AI was ever thought of and plenty of humans couldn't agree on whether art made by other humans was any good or not anyway, so saying something is "obviously AI" isn't really a convincing argument.
More concerning is the announcement, flagged on the opening splash screen of the demo, that the game is leaving Early Access and launching for real in barely a week's time, on 5 March. In EA, Equinox Homecoming has a Very Positive rating on Steam from over 700 reviews (The demo, separately rated, is Mixed but from just twenty-five.) but many of those positive reviews specifically talk about the game being "promising", having "potential" or being in a good state "for an Early Access title".
From what I've seen in the demo, the game would appear to be mostly complete and free of major bugs but as I said at the start, the demo isn't much more than the tutorial. Tutorials and the first few hours of MMORPGs are frequently far more polished than the rest of the game at launch. I have no way of knowing if that's the case here and neither will anyone else who plays the demo.
With that caveat, if the full release lives up to the demo and if the developer, Blue Scarab Entertainment, continues to add content and update the game in the manner of an MMORPG, then it might be a pretty good game.
Whether it will be a pretty good MMORPG is another matter. I still can't really see why it needs to be one at all.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment