There are only so many First Impressions posts you can write before you're into just plain Impressions and I feel like I've been playing long enough for that. I don't have any of those nifty little apps that monitor and record how much time I'm spending on each game I play but I think it's fair to say that, since I downloaded Soulframe, most of my gaming time has been taken up by it.
I generally play games for at least a couple of hours a day. Occasionally I might double that but it would be unusual, so in a full week, which is exactly how long I've had access to the Soulframe Pre-Alpha, I've most likely played games for something like fifteen to twenty hours, in total. I've been doing my dailies in Neverness To Everness and putting in a few sessions of Nivalis Nights, here and there, all of which probably doesn't come to more than six or seven hours, so I'd guess I'm somewhere around ten to twelve hours into Soulframe, at least.
A dozen hours in an MMORPG, is more than enough to build a first impression, I'd say. It's nowhere near enough for a full review, which arguably ought to wait at least until the reviewer has been through the entire leveling process, whatever it is, and even had some experience of the end game, assuming there is one. By which time, if the game isn't in maintenance mode, enough will probably have changed to make the review feel out of date before it even goes to print. No wonder reviewers tend to shy away from the genre.
Twelve hours, however, is surely enough for a Final First Impression. And my Final First Impression is...
Favorable. Shading towards Very Favorable.
I like the combat. It's tactile, intuitive and robust. It has a solidity that feels satisfying. Granted, I've still only played a ranged class, an archer, so melee and magic might be terrible for all I know, but in my experience archery is one of the hardest combat skills for a designer to pull off. If they can get that right, they shouldn't have too much difficulty with the rest, should they?
In Soulframe, mobs drop a lot of loot. They spew out money, crafting mats (Not that I've seen any sign of a crafting system so far..) and weapons among other things. No armor, curiously, although I think there's some kind of fragment system, where you have to collect enough bits to make a whole piece. There's always something to pick up, anyway, and most of it looks like it's going to be useful. When I can figure out what to do with it.
Since we're on the subject of loot, I guess we ought to talk about inventory. I'm nowhere near as obsessed with inventory management as I was when I started this blog but I do like to keep an eye on it. I can't really venture much of an opinion on how well it's being handled in Soulframe because as of now, I have yet to encounter any storage issues at all.
My character has a backpack that doesn't display. It's well-designed, with plenty of tabs and filters to sort the contents by type and quality and so on. I noticed early on that additional inventory space is one of the things for sale in the Cash Shop and I've just made reference to the large amount of loot that drops off everything you kill, so I was expecting something along the lines of Guild Wars 2, where one of the drivers to get you to spend money is making your bags fill up with crap.
And maybe it will happen but it hasn't happened yet. I pick up literally everything that drops. I also forage all the time. It all goes into that invisible backpack and after a week it's still not full. There's also no weight or size limit. Minnow must be carrying about three dozen assorted weapons now but it's fine; they weigh nothing and take up no space.
Which is just as well because as yet there's no sign of a bank to store any overspill. In fact, there's little sign of any commercial or social infrastructure at all.
In all the time I've been playing, I've seen no more than half a dozen other players and that was only in two very specific circumstances. In my first session, while I was questing, my Sparrow guide led me to one of those glowing tombstones that turn up all over the map. I had no idea what it was for but I clicked on it anyway and it turned out to be a group-finder.
In a few seconds I was in a party. I assumed grouping was required for the quest so I went along with it. I was ported into an instance, where a couple of people were running around, killing mobs. No-one said anything, naturally, me included.
I had no clue what we were supposed to be doing and I never found out. After a couple of minutes I found a ladder going down into a well and since it was there, I used it. Why not? At the bottom was an entrance to the Danak Undercity, which was the first time I knew it existed. My Sparrow told me I needed to go in there for the quest I was on but I figured it would need a group, since that was how I got there in the first place, so I waited.
No-one else came. After a while I got fed up of waiting and climbed back up the ladder. I was still partied with a couple of people but they were nowhere in sight so I decided to give up on that quest and go back to the open world. I couldn't figure out how to leave the group so in the end I had to log out to get rid of the unwanted company. Later on, I found I hadn't needed to group for the quest at all. Clicking on the party-finder stone had been my mistake. The Sparrow was trying to take me somewhere else entirely.
That was the first time I saw other players. The second and so far last time was when I found the Inn.
It was right at the end of a session, though, and I didn't really have a good look around. There might be more services in there. There could even be a bank. I really ought to go back and have another look but that was days ago and I haven't really had any reason to return.
Based on those experiences and the rest of my dozen or so hours in the game, I'd have to guess Soulframe is a lobby MMO. It feels like the open world is entirely a solo affair, although I guess it might also be co-op if you have friends who play. Dungeons, which seem to be quite common (I clicked on several more stones just to check what they were, then declined to make a group when the pop-up appeared.) have so far been optional, although I wouldn't be at all surprised to find some quests require a party.
And now I'm going to check online to see if that's right... and guess what? It is, or pretty nearly.
Here's how Gemini summarizes it:
"Soulframe is not a true MMORPG; it is an action RPG built around single-player and small-group co-op (typically 3-player parties), with MMO-lite elements very similar to the developers' other game, Warframe"
Well there it is. What puzzles me a little is that I could have sworn, back when I briefly played Warframe, that there were at least some true open-world areas there. I guess I misremembered.
The thing is... it feels like a proper MMO. Not because of the mechanics but because there's a general chat channel, on by default, in which conversation literally never stops. The entire time I've been playing, chat has been scrolling faster than I can read it. It's a very polite, well-mannered sort of general chat, too, and I'd be happy to have it on, except it's much too distracting. I had to shrink the window so the type was almost too small to read, just so I could concentrate on what I was doing.
On that evidence, I'd say that if you're one of those players who likes the idea of playing games in a social space but who doesn't actually want to interact with other people, except at a time and place of your own choosing, Soulframe would be perfect. Lots of chatter to make it feel sociable but no-one sniping your mobs or sending you invites to do things you don't want to do.
On the Environment, as Tyler Edwards pointed out in a comment, the reason the entire world looks so miserable is because it's been corrupted. A big part of the gameplay involves you, the player, restoring the land to its former charm. You have to destroy Syphons, which is a whole feature I have yet to experience, so I'll leave it at that for now. Just be advised, the world won't always look so awful.
Another environmental feature I haven't mentioned yet are the World Trees. The map is covered with Fog of War but you can't clear it just by exploring. You have to find the big trees with something that looks like a pitchfork rammed through the trunk and then you have to pull the pitchfork out. That clears a large area of the map, which is great. What's not so great is that there's no way to tell where the trees are, other than by bumping into one by chance. I think some kind of indicator to give a hint at least where to start looking would be helpful.
As for the sound, it's very good, by which I mean it's actually useful. There's some voice acting, which I wouldn't put any higher than competent and professional but the ambient sound is very good. There's bugger all wildlife thanks to the corruption, so there's no cheerful hum of birdsong and insect calls, but the infernal machinery makes appropriately sinister noises and you can hear people at work in the camps.
The really effective use of sound, though, is the yells of your enemies. Every last humanoid mob speaks or more often shouts as soon as they gain aggro on you, which is extremely helpful of them. Thanks to the rain and fog and the smart but annoying tendency of the enemy to use cover effectively, I often can't see where the arrows or the fireballs are coming from. But I can hear! Minnow echo-locates like a bat half the time. It's very organic.
I suspect much of this may come from the game having been designed first for controllers rather than keyboard or mouse, but some of the combinations required to do things feel far from natural. There's too much pressing and holding two keys and I really don't think the scroll wheel on the mouse ought to come into things at all.
I've had a quest to equip, charge and use a rune for about five days now and I still haven't been able to do it. At first I thought I'd just play and it would become obvious but that never happened so I googled it and read the very lengthy explanation Gemini gave me.
Maybe it's just me, but I feel that if an AI needs five paragraphs to summarize the mechanics of a simple thing like charging and casting a rune, your design might need a rethink. Still, at least now I knew what I had to do... So I did it and it still didn't work! I've equipped my rune and charged it now but can I figure out how to fire it? Can I hell! I even watched a YouTube video and it still didn't make it clear.
This isn't all that unusual in my experience so far. I had to redo the quest to get the wolf pup pet three times because twice the key for the cage didn't drop. I didn't do anything wronmg and it isn't exactly a bug. It's just too finnicky to be 100% reliable. It's worth it, though. The pup is very cute and apparently one day Minnow will be able to ride her as a mount. Which, since there seems to be no instant travel at all, will be nice.
These kinds of things are quite common, it seems. Remember all that buzz in General Chat I was talking about earlier? At least half of it must be people trying to find out how to do something the game isn't letting them do. Or more likely isn't making it clear how to do. It's in this way that Soulframe really does feel like a Pre-Alpha.
Another thing I'm not fond of is the extent to which the developers seem to be excited by their own lore and jargon. I've been talking about "questing" but that's not a word the game uses. It doesn't say"missions", either, which would be equally acceptable. Soulframe likes to call those things it wants you to do "Votives" or "Fables".
Fables are Main Story Quests. Votives are side quests. I had to look that up. It was not clear to me at all just from playing the game. I know it's boring , using the same language as everyone else, but conventions exist for a reason, guys!
If you want to see just how off-putting the shop-talk can be, try reading the recent Update notes. I'm broadly in favor of in-character patch notes, especially when it's done for laughs, but this is just too much flavor for something that's primarily meant to be informative, particularly for a new player. I know that, after a while, meaning will seep into all those currently incomprehensible words and I'll stop noticing how uncomfortably self-conscious it all sounds but this is a First Impressions piece and I'm not quite there yet.
I am, however, at the end of both the post and my initiation into the game. No more First Impressions from now on. Just play reports and opinions. Although I suspect it will be hard to tell the difference.
My tl:dr for an overall first impression of the game? Some work still to be done but, all things considered, very promising.
Very promising indeed!
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