There were other things I could have posted about today but I guess I'd better carry on with my first impressions of Soulframe, before I forget what they were. To refresh my memory, this morning, before I started writing, I logged in for a quick reminder, so I'm now about four and a half hours into the game.
A lot less far into the story, though. I don't seem to have made a lot of progress there...
This seems like a good moment to talk about the structure of the game, in terms of what you can do and what it seems the developers would prefer that you do. As far as I can tell, it's a true open world game, the kind where you can go anywhere you want, regardless of whether it's in your best interests to go there, but if you let it, the game will keep you running on rails. From the minute you arrive in the world (It has a name, by the way. It's called Alca.) you're given a list objectives, something I found very familiar from numerous recent survival and open-world titles I've played.
It seems to be standard practice these days and it sometimes means I find it hard to be sure whether I've finished the Tutorial or not. The instructions just keep on coming, long after it feels like they're really needed. The most extreme example I can remember was Chimeraland, where I played for weeks without ever getting to the point where the game wasn't telling me what to do next, but they almost all do it to some degree.
I have no way of knowing where to place Soulframe on that spectrum because almost as soon as I'd started, I gave up taking direction and wandered off to do my own thing instead.
Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration. Before I broke ranks, I did do as I was told, for a while. After I got reacquainted with grandad, I got sent to a tower, where I found the ghost of a scholar. He was quite a disturbing apparition, having apparently nailed a baby to his shoulder. Well, glued, perhaps. Fixed in a wholly unnatural position, anyway. It made it hard to concentrate on what he was saying, that's for sure.
I ought to make it clear it wasn't that the designer couldn't draw babies, something not uncommon in video games, where it often seems the art department have very little experience (Or interest.) in drawing anyone other than teenage girls or bodybuilders. It was more that this baby pretty obviously wasn't an actual baby. I said "homunculus" to myself the moment I saw it. Out loud, too. Lucky I was on my own at the time.
We need to talk about the killing. There is a lot of it. Really a lot. I know all fantasy MMORPGs revolve almost entirely around indiscriminate slaughter but in most, a great deal of the bloodshed involves animals or monsters, which somehow dulls the "demented mass murderer" tone to everything you do. There's no such get-out clause in Soulframe, not that I've seen. So far, I've encountered precisely two kinds of enemies: humans and dogs.
The good news is that you don't actually have to kill the dogs. They're war-dogs in armor and when you reduce their hit points to zero they don't die, they just run away, howling. The seemingly endless horde of knights in armor and archers that accompany them isn't handled so sensitively. They just fall down dead.
And they are everywhere. Well, everywhere that isn't just bleak, barren, empty countryside. There's a lot of that. The world, as far as I've explored it, is a wasteland. (There's an exception, which I'll come to...) It looks like there was a war not too long ago, one of those wars of attrition, where everything gets churned into mud. Now everything's quiet again. Mostly because there's nothing left alive.
There are some villages, here and there, and they have villagers. Rarely more than one or two. You can't kill them. You can't talk to them, either. If you get close, they say something along the lines of "Please don't kill me" and then they either carry on working or run away.
Often there are knights in armor and archers in the same villages and they definitely don't run away. They run straight out you, yelling. Then they do their damndest to kill you.
Apart from the battered countryside, there's the sea and a huge wall, something along the lines of the one in Attack On Titan. (Full disclosure: I have neither read nor watched Attack On Titan.) My working theory is that the knights are an occupying army and their home is beyond that wall.
Except I've been beyond that wall (Had to kill a bunch of guards and use a lever to open the gate.) and it's pretty much more of the same. It's all pretty much more of the same and yet quite different enough to be interesting. Minnow wandered along the coast, through what's left of the forest, swam to an island and went down into the undercity, which is the exception I mentioned earlier. The undercity is where all the good weather, flowers and sunlight are.
Yes, underground. If you want to get out of the gloom and despair and you're looking for light and fresh air, go down a hole! Digital Extremes does like to be different.
Beneath the land lies a maze of tunnels, lit by braziers, torches and shafts of sunlight. In numerous places there are gaping holes where the tunnels have been breached and exposed to the sky. The whole time I was down there, the sunlight just poured in. Sunlight, I should point out, which was nowhere in evidence when I was on the surface.
What's even stranger is that, wherever the sun comes in, the floor is covered with grass and flowers. It's like late spring in an alpine meadow down there. Why? How? Who knows! It's just a relief to have something nice to look at for a change.
Ah, that's unfair though. Soulframe is a very good-looking game. The world may be dour and filled with mud but it's beautifully appointed. There's scenery everywhere. The character models are great, too. In both look and feel,it immediately brings to mind another game...
In the comments on the previous post, Tyler Edwards brought up the New World comparison. It's extremely valid. One of the first things I thought, as soon as I started exploring, was "This reminds me of New World."
As I've been saying, much of the landscape I've seen so far is a lot less attractive than Aeternum but it has a very similar aesthetic. Traveling through the landscape feels very similar, except that there's no climbing mechanic (Yet - it is pre-alpha...), which made for a jarring disconnect every time Minnow ran at a wall and didn't immediately haul herself up on top of it. On the other hand, she jumps like a jackrabbit.
The mechanics bear close comparison, too. I'm still figuring it out but the basics seem really close to New World's. You can use a variety of weapons and your skill increases with use. You can spend points to open more effects or abilities for each weapon and you can augment them with various materials.
I'm vague on this for a couple of reasons. The game explains almost nothing, which is fine for the most part because it's all very intuitive, but which leaves any subtleties or nuances largely invisible at these early stages. And I've chosen not to look anything up because so far everything feels extremely organic and natural, again something I always found New World to be, so I haven't needed to.
I think that, in contrast to New World, it may be the actual weapons that improve, rather than your skill in using them. All of them are named and the skill increases that appear on screen every time you level up always have the name of the weapon. For example, Minnow started with a bow called Thistle and that bow is now Level 17. She's acquired several more bows since - weapons drop all the time - but they all have different names and they're all Level 1.
I could look all this up and if I was writing a guide, I would. But I'm giving my first impressions and those are that I don't really need to know yet and I quite like not knowing. I'll dig into it if I start having difficulty but so far, I have had very little trouble killing my way across the map. Very little trouble indeed.
As I said last time, picking a ranger or a scout in a new game doesn't generally go well for me. I often have to swap to a melee character just to get the hang of things. Or to stay alive. In Soulframe, it's been a pleasure. The bow is a joy to use and it's very effective.
For one thing, there's no ammunition. You never run out of arrows. For another, the aiming is really excellent. If you have the target in sight and in range, the red health bar appears. If not, it doesn't. Hard to get that wrong. You can prepare a shot by holding down RMB, which makes it do more damage. It also zooms in on the target, making aiming even easier. Then you hit LMB while still holding RMB and off the arrow goes. It feels very tactile and satisfying.
Mostly, though, I've been proceeding by the inelegant practice of backpedaling while firing, something that's extremely easy to do on the mostly open, flattish surfaces. Each successful shot has a high chance of staggering the enemy, a chance that can be increased by spending points, so it's fairly simple to keep the target from getting to you before it dies. It felt really familiar from an ancient memory of bow-kiting in EverQuest, where I'd snare something so it couldn't catch up to me and the pump it full of arrows at little risk to myself.
If the victim manages to catch up, Minnow can turn into a butterfly for a few seconds and fly away, which nearly always gives her enough space to start raining arrows again. Health is restored with potions, of which you can carry only five. I imagine at some point she'll be able to buy or craft them but so far she's been getting a plentiful supply from the downed bodies of her victims.
Drinking a potion is easily done, even in combat, by pressing X and clicking the potion that appears on screen with the mouse. I am generally very bad at using potions but I can use these just fine.
Mobs drop loot - quite a lot of loot. Much of it seems to be either currency or crafting mats, none of which I yet have found a use for. I have yet to meet a single friendly NPC other than a couple of questgivers, neither of whom seemed to be actually alive. Most loot gets hoovered up automatically as you run over it but any weapons or other objects, you have to stop and click on, which seems like an excellent system to me.
All things considered, I've been finding Soulframe a very enjoyable game, mecanically. It feels very natural and once again the closest comparison I can come up with is New World. The combat has the same "I could just keep doing this for the fun of it" feeling, which is not something I say about a lot of games.
Where the combat departs from New World's, though, might be in how far above my weight limit I seem to be able to punch. Like, about thirty levels...
In my second session, instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing, I went exploring. There are bizarre magitech constructs all over the place and it's far too tempting not to go look at them. In that regard, the other game it reminds me of is Nightingale. Which, now I come to think of it, always reminded me of New World...
As I worked my way along the coast, clearing hostiles out of villages and settlements as I went, I noticed the numbers next to the soldiers I was killing were getting higher and higher. I wasn't precisely sure of my own level, if the player-character indeed has a specific level, rather than just the level of the weapon they're holding, but I was pretty sure it was in the low teens at the most.
The mobs I was killing went into the teens, then the twenties and carried on rising. I kept going, mostly to see when I'd get out of my depth. It was when I'd just pulled and successfully kited and killed a group of four mobs in their low 40s that I started to wonder if that was ever going to happen. It did, eventually, when I finally got overconfident, taking on a team of guards in the high forties, but even then I could easily have backed off and whittled them down, one by one.
By then, I was actively looking for something to kill me. I had yet to die in almost three hours of play and I was curious to see what happened.
It turned out to be as confusing as most things in the game. On her death, the viewpoint changed to one of the big, glowing tombstones that appear, here and there, and Minnow was given the choice of reviving there or sending Sparrow to her corpse.
Since then I've died a few times and I've tried both options. I'm still not clear on how the Sparrow one works. Getting up at the stone is straightforward but if I choose Sparrow and fly back, I never seem to go to exactly the same place I died and I don't see my body on the ground, either. That might be because I didn't really know where I was when I died, of course. Also, Sparrow's flight is likely to induce motion sickness in anyone who's sensitive to it so be warned of that.
As for a death penalty, other than the interruption, I'm not sure if there is one. I didn't get any messages about skill loss or debuffs and if I was missing anything, I didn't notice.
And that's where I'm going to leave it for now, this post having taken me all day, on and off. Not to mention that, as usual, it's running long. Before I go, I'll just bring it back round to where it was supposed to be headed in the first place, namely the difference between what the game wanted me to do and what I did, to say that very little of what I've described has anything to do with the objectives the game was clearly intending me to concentrate on but that I had a whole load of fun just doing my own thing.
After something like three hours of fairly chaotic exploration, all of which was very enjoyable and quite satisfying, I did eventually decide it might be time to get back on the rails. I logged out this morning having just gotten Minnow back to where she first decided to run off into the countryside. That would seem to be a good place to pick things up next time, when I come to write the third in what is clearly going to be a series of First Impression posts.
The tl:dr so far is that Soulframe is a lot of fun. It looks good and it plays well. It's felt both familiar and new from the start and if I was going to play a fantasy MMORPG right now, I think I'd be as likely to play this one for a while as any. And if I was looking for a new game to try for when New World sunsets, I'd definitely check it out.
Worth the download, then. Now I just have to wait and see how long it holds my attention, I guess. I'll most likely be writing about it as long as it does. I'm not short of things to say about it, that's for sure.
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