Taking The Tour - Housing In AdventureQuest 3D - Part 2

AdventureQuest 3D is an odd game. Artix seems like an odd developer. I don't play often but when I do it often feels like I've slipped through the veil into another timeline, somewhere they just do things... differently.

I'll give you a for-example. Lots of games have instanced housing but I can't think of a single one where your room has no door. 

Oh, sure, there are games that only let you enter via a button in the UI. You can't go to an actual door in the shared space of the open world and click on it to go inside. Once you're inside your home, though, there's always at least a visual signifier of egress, even if it's only notional.

When I zoned into my free room in ADQ3 for the first time, I was disturbed to find there was no way out. The room has no door. It doesn't have much else, either. I don't think I've seen such a minimal floor-plan since the earliest days of EverQuest II and even then there was a choice of layouts available and most of the rooms came with at least a few features. And a door. Always a door.

As I was looking around my room, such as it was, yesterday, I put the austerity down to two things: it's a brand-new feature and ADQ3 is far from being a visual feast at the best of times. Either no-one thought having a door mattered or they hadn't gotten around to adding one yet. What never occurred to me was that someone on the team might make  getting a door to your room an aspirational feature.

But that's what it is in AQ3D. If you want a door you have to go buy one. I did. You can see it there in the screenshot at the top of the post, along with a couple of bushes and a big, lighted window. And my four-poster bed.

I bought all of those and none of them surprised me except the door. I have homes in many games and I've bought bushes and beds for most of them. Windows, too, on occasion. A door, though? That's a new one on me.

Okay, I've bought extra doors and special doors. Doors that open or fit a theme. I've just never had to buy a door so there'd be a door. 

But that's AQ3D for you. Want another example? Here's one.

After I'd seen my room and spent a few planks making it look homier... wait, what? Planks? Who pays for things with planks?

Okay, let's take a step back. I wasn't going to get into this but we may as well. It's another example of how odd this game can be. 

So, you can buy all kinds of fixtures and fittings from the B.U.I.L.D. vendors in the Trading District of the main town, Battleon but they don't accept either the in-game currency, Gold, or the cash shop variety, Dragon Crystals. No, they want either Sturdy Materials or Solid Materials. 

Cozy Inn Room

Sturdy is wood aka planks, Solid is stone aka bricks. There's a pair of daily quest to collect fifty of each. It's very easy. They drop from anything you can kill because of course all animals carry bricks in their non-existent pockets.

Even without the dailies, I had to hand in fifty of each type for one of the quests in the opening section of the Get Your House line. Somehow I already had enough of both on me for it to autocomplete. I still don't know if they were in my inventory from earlier or if the quest just added them on the spot.

Either way, I had loads left so I was able to buy what I wanted and while I was shopping I also noticed all the other house deeds you can buy for Dragon Crystals. I somehow have 1100DC although how I got it I couldn't tell you. It was enough for some of the cheaper ones.

Dark  Castle Room

I wasn't going to spend precious Crystals without seeing what I'd be getting for them, of course. Neither would anyone with any sense, which is why there's a Preview option. I started at the top of the list and worked my way down. There are only half a dozen, plus one you can only buy with Gold. 

Y'know what? Let's start with that one because I think it says a lot about whoever designs stuff in this game. The Gold-Only Deed is called Castle Room and it costs 2.5m Gold. That's right. Two and a half fricken' million! I have 27k. Alright, I'm only level 8 but still... Does income really ramp up that much?

Even if it does, I wouldn't spend twenty-five Gold on the poky little closet they're peddling, let alone twenty-five million. I'm not even going to waste a screenshot on it here. It's not like there'd be anything to look at. It's a boxy, square, high-ceilinged room made of rough stone, about the same size as the one you get for free. Maybe not even that big. That's it. Why would you even... ?

Anyway, moving on... 

Naturalist's Hut

I spent a while visiting all the properties and taking screenshots. You can see them here in the post, all labelled with the name of the Deed.

As you can see, they vary wildly. The first three are single, closed rooms much like the free version but with more character. I wouldn't bother with the not entirely accurately named Cozy Inn Room even at the knock-down price of 500DC but the Dark Castle Room has a certain, gothic appeal and I did seriously consider parting with a thousand Crystals for the Naturalist's Hut, which has some nice features including a small mezzanine floor and a big tree.

For just a couple hundred more you can have your own Warehouse. Why you'd want to live in a warehouse is another question but it's actually surprisingly attractive. At least it has good, natural light from some large windows and it might even have a view, if you could get up high enough to see out of them. You can see the sky with clouds moving across it and the tops of trees, at least. It's not bad at all.

Wiggly's Warehouse

If you can afford the extra, though, things take a dramatic turn at 2000DC. For a couple of grand you get not just a room but an entire zone, either the Greenguard Quarry (Actually a verdant valley.) or your own Tropical Island, complete with dock and moored sailing vessel (That you can't get to, sadly.)

It's a ridiculous leap. One minute you're locked in a single room, next moment you have a whole valley to yourself or a substantial chunk of coastline. 

Of course, what you don't get is a house. Just the land. I'm not sure how that works. The B.U.I.L.D. vendors don't sell prefabricated construction parts other than walls, and I'm not sure whether you can craft any. I think I'd at least want a roof.

Greenguard Quarry

As I said yesterday, you can slowly accrue cash shop currency for free from the Login daily. The 2k options are sufficiently attractive that I'm motivated to put AQ3D on my daily to-do list just to open my three, free chests each day until I get the extra 900DC I'd need for the island. I haven't had a daily login game since I stopped playing Noah's Heart. I could do with a new one. It does give my gaming day some structure.

About fifteen paragraphs back you might remember I said something about another example of how AQ3D does things differently. Perhaps you think we had it already. We didn't. Here it comes now.

As I was cycling through the previews, I was becoming increasingly irritated by the way the game put me back at the zone line every time I left the instance, meaning I had to run all the way across town to pick up the next preview. If you were designing it, wouldn't you put the player back at the same vendor who'd just shown you around so you could either buy that Deed or go look at another?

Tropical Island

Guess what? Artix did think of that. They just decided it would be more fun if you had to earn it. You can buy a Travel Crystal from the vendor that lets you teleport instantly back to the vendor who sold it to you, who just happens to be standing next to the Deeds guy. The Deeds guy himself doesn't sell one. That would be too easy...

Naturally you can't buy the Travel Crystal with Gold, either. That would be crass. Or maybe jejune. One of those. No, you have to buy it with planks and bricks. I don't know... maybe the vendor actually goes out back and builds the damn thing for you with the stuff you give her. I wouldn't be surprised.

Once you have it, you can slot it onto your hotbar and port instantly back to the housing depot. It's a lot handier than using the door. Especially since the door doesn't work.

Excuse me? Do I know you?

There's probably more I could say about AdventureQuest 3D's new housing feature but I think I've probably said enough. More than enough, really, even if I haven't mentioned the placement UI for furniture (It's not great.) or how I realize now I missed several steps out of that long-ass bullet point list yesterday, including the weirdest one, the bit where I had to go tell my roommate (Who I didn't even know existed...) that I was moving out, or the most pedantic part, where I had to go and collect some empty moving crates for all my stuff (As if it actually existed...)

As MMORPG housing goes, it's a long way from being the best I've seen. It's not even close to being the best I've seen in a free game. But it's not at all a bad start. Plenty there to build on, if you'll pardon the pun.

Hmm. Now I want to know what B.U.I.L.D. stands for. I mean. it has to stand for something, doesn't it? They wouldn't just put those periods there for show, would they?

Would they? I dunno. It's AQ3D. They might, at that...

Home, At Last - Housing In AdventureQuest 3D - Part 1.

Contractually obliged, as I am, to cover developments regarding housing in any and every MMORPG I have ever, will ever or might ever play, regardless of how much I or anyone reading this could care less about them, as soon as I read the news about AdventureQuest 3D's latest update I knew I'd be writing this post. 

I know! You don't need to tell me! It's not like I don't have better things to do with my time but here we are anyway. I knew what I was getting into when I started this thing so theres' no point complaining about it now.

I ought to make it clear before we go any further, this won't be any kind of Guide To AQ3D Housing or even a walkthrough, although lord knows someone should write one. When I logged in this morning I thought I'd be done in ten minutes. It took me two and a half hours.

It shouldn't have. It's not like I haven't claimed a free house in an MMORPG before, right? I know the form. A couple of clicks, zone in and it's over.

Oh hell, no. Not in AQ3D, where everything always takes forever. It has to be one of the nitpickiest, fidlly-faddly games I've ever played, which I don't necessarily mean as a criticism. It's actually part of the appeal but I always forget until I play again just what an old-school set-up Artix have going here. It might have a lot of time-saving devices like instant travel straight from the map but it also has a propensity to take everything extremely literally, the way these games did twenty years ago.

It's only taken eight years...

Remember when in EverQuest II, if you wanted to start a guild you had to go to a government office in town, speak to a registrar, obtain a document entitling you to solicit membership, then cart the thing around with you until you found enough people willing to sign it? Then you had to take it back and hand it in to be notarized? 

Maybe I'm imagining some of that but that's how I remember it and that's going to be how I remember getting my first house in AQ3D ten years from now. A whole lot of running around, talking to people and getting the paperwork straight. If that's your idea of a good time, jump on in. You can thank me later.

To be fair, I was almost expecting it. Before I even started, I took the trouble to watch a video on YouTube. I had a notion it would save me some grief and it did. A little. I think my first mistake was pausing the video after thirty seconds, as soon as we saw the NPC giving the quest. I figured I could take it from there.

And I was right, except I had no idea how much farther it was going to take me and how many times I'd get turned around and have to go look up how to find my way back to where I needed to be. By the time I'd finished I'd watched three more videos , read the official handout and browsed two reddit threads. And I still got half of it wrong.

You could at least give me a hard hat!

It certainly didn't help that as I was stumbling my way through the extraordinarily long list of things to do before you get your key, I kept getting sidetracked by other quests. AQ3D is an exceptionally quest-driven game with NPCs everywhere calling out or beckoning you to come do their jobs for them. 

I managed to tune most of them out but it still seemed like every second NPC I had to speak to for the quest I was actually on also had two other things they wanted me to do while I was in the neighborhood. I don't mean I had to do those before they'd help me. It wasn't one of those Little Red Hen situations we're all so very fond of in our games. No, it was worse than that.

I've always believed AQ3D has some kind of a reputation as a kids' game in the vein of Wizard 101, even though whenever I play it that never seems to be borne out by what I see or do there. For example, would you think it was appropriate for a game aimed at minors to include a parody of the infamous diner robbery scene from Pulp Fiction?

No, me neither, but when I went to the bank to get the manager to sign my Proof of Insurance so I could move into my new home, that's exactly what I found myself caught up in. And naturally I was the one who had to put a stop to it, too.

Why are you laughing, dad? I don't get it...

I guess the excuse would be that it's like the old joke about the lady who complains because a man walks past whistling a dirty song. If you don't already know...

My problem with it wasn't anything to do with morality or decorum. It was more along the lines of it being a pain, having to kill ten bank robbers before I could just get on with my business. The same sort of thing happened in the forest and in the bank vault and just about everywhere I went, mostly because the AQ3D quest interface is not the easiest to parse. I was never quite sure which quest was mine and there always seemed to be several of them so I kept starting new ones.

It's also not the least-buggy game I've played, either. Somehow, I managed to kill all ten bank robbers and still ended up with only 9/10 on my count. I was wondering if that was going to be a problem but then I zoned out and in again and all ten were back, along with Honey and Pumpken, who I'd also killed the last time. 

Pretty soon I had 11/10 on my kill-card, which another strange quirk of the game - you can get extra credit for going too far. Rather than carry on, I just talked to the Bank Manager, who happened to be an owl but we won't get into that, and suddenly all the robbers went away. 

Things like that seem to happen quite often in AQ3D. I think it has some fairly robust self-correcting processes running in the background that put you back on track when the wheels start to come off, which I guess is one way of handling it. Personally, I'd prefer they just worked properly in the first place but then I'm old and bad at adjusting to the new ways.

Just what I play fantasy role-playing games for - the paperwork!

To sum up, the brief sequence for getting a house runs something like this. Remember, it's not a walkthrough. If I was going to write a walkthrough I'd have taken notes. This is just what I remember and some screenshots I took.

• Speak to the first questgiver who sends you to the second questgiver. 
• Speak to all the builders, about half a dozen of them. 
• Find the tools and the toolbox one of the idiots dropped off the roof. He's the foreman, too, so that gives you an idea how competent these people are. 
• Go to the forest and speak to a surveyor. Do his damn job for him.
• Go back to town and speak to the Architect.
• Speak to the guy you spoke to earlier and find out you need Insurance. Seriously, when was the last time you needed an actual insurance certificate to buy a house in a game? What are these guys on?
• Go to the bank and find out the Manager can't issue your Insurance because he's lost his pen. 
• Stop a bank robbery on the way to the vaults where he thinks he might have lost it. Not sure if that part has anything to do with the housing questline or not. I doubt it, actually...
• End up doing a completely different questline about getting access to the Main Vault because everything is all jumbled together and nothing is clear. 
• Do that and then realize on the hand-in you didn't need to but now you have the follow-up so you're in it up to your neck.
• Finally remember AQ3D has a quest-marker that literally points you to the next location, right down to each individual item of a collect-10 or a scavenger hunt. 
• Kick yourself. You deserve it.
• Using the quest-marker, go to the right vault, kill the right mob and get the owl's pen back. (Turns out it's not his pen but if that's a plot  thread I didn't follow it.)
• Try to hand it in then realize you really do have to go to a desk and actually sign the sodding insurance form. Mutter bleakly about some people taking things far too literally.
• Get the signed insurance form authorized and go back to where you started.
• Speak to that guy yet again and get the key to your new place!

...and then find you have to pay real money for it.

Nah. No you don't. But I believed you did for about fifteen minutes, all because the blasted quest interface is so confusing. I clicked on the unlabelled + sign that lets you add a second home to your collection, an additional perk for which, not unreasonably, you have to pay.   

Oh, now I see it...

I spent a while fulminating about the injustice of it all and figuring out how to earn the necessary cash shop coin to buy a house without actually having to get my credit card out (You can earn a random amount of the necessary Dragon Crystals by opening the daily Login chest. It could take anything from a couple of weeks to a few months to collect enough because the daily stipend is extremely random.) 

Then I finally noticed the original announcement does specifically say the new housing system gives you a free house. And the wall of text explains you need to "locate the new housing button in the menu" and "click on the inviting door icon" to be whisked away to your "very own abode". 

So I did that and found myself, at long last, in a grim cell with no door, no furniture and just two dully glowing windows you can't see out of. Holy hell! All of that for this?

As it happens, it's really a lot better than that but the first impression wasn't great. I'd explain how it gets better but this post has run on long enough already. Also, this way I get two posts out of it, which is only fair since it took me all morning to do.

Part two tomorrow, unless anything more pressing arrives before then.

Ready For Prime Time? : AQ3D

In his September In Review post, Wilhelm observed "... if you want to be popular, post about WoW". To this sage advice I can add a corollary: if you want to be ignored, post about AdventureQuest 3D.

My previous post on that particular game drew fewer page views than just about anything I can remember writing; certainly fewer than any post this year. No-one, it seems, is on the edge of his or her seat waiting for the upcoming Open Beta of this one.

Ah yes, the open beta. The open beta that's scheduled for "October". That's now.

Is it ready? Not according to most posters on the forum. Here are some sample quotes:

"After playing for quite a lot over the past few days, I feel that this game isn't ready to be launch to the public yet at its current state"

"I personally think launching the game in October is dangerous when the game is at this current state"

"...it might be a good idea to postpone the beta"

"Really can't see why you'd put the game in open beta in this state so soon."

"The game, at the current state, is not ready for Open Beta"

I do love how my character looks.

And so on.  Now, I've beta tested quite a few MMOs. Comments like this are not all that unusual because there's a contingent that thinks things could always be better and that nothing should ever be revealed to the general public until it shines like the Spirit of Ecstasy on a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. They're usually drowned out by the majority that just wants to get on with it.

The last time I had access to beta forums so determined that the doors should stay shut must have been the original launch of FFXIV. We all know how that turned out. AQ3D does not have the kind of problems SquareEnix did. The game works. You can play it. It doesn't claim to do a thousand things it doesn't do. It doesn't have a rabid fanbase hammering at the doors trying to get in. As far as I know...

The reason AQ3D may not be ready for Open Beta is not what you might think. It's not overly buggy or filled with half-finished systems that don't work. It runs fine for the most part - for an MMO in closed beta. No, the real problem AQ3D has is this: it's bloody hard!

Ye gods, is it hard! If you yearn for those glorious days in the late 1990s, when Level 3 took you six hours grinding orc pawns, get those rose-tinted specs on and sign up now.

Remember the fun you had killing hundreds of lions in East Karana in the vain hope that this time, this time, the High Quality Lion Skin would drop and you'd finally be able to craft your Fleeting Quiver? Imagine how much more fun it would be if that drop rate applied to all crafting mats!

Drop table needs work.

Disgusted by the way MMOs have shifted over the years to favor soloists over groups?  Here are dungeons so hard that solo players can't expect to get through the first room; where even being grossly over-levelled doesn't guarantee you won't die horribly.

Don't just take my word for it. Have some more quotes:

"... the drop rate for the items are terrible, you will be sitting in 1 farm location for 1-3 hours and still not have any of the materials you were farming for"

"...part of the dungeon is almost impossible for me, and I'm a level 14 player with Nightlocke weapons. I don't think it's a level 7 dungeon at all."

"The drop rates to get crafting items are horrible, and you need to run the same dungeon approximately 10 times (if you have some luck) to get ONE item. ONE upgrade."

"Made it to level8, and still lvl4 monsters in the first dungeon are impossible."

"I have been fighting the monsters ... for over four hours and I am still only level four. ... I am level four and a level two monster can almost kill me".

I could pull out dozens of quotes like these. Surprisingly, perhaps, most of the players complaining
have actually taken the time and effort to grind their way up the levels, through the dungeons and into the meat of the game. I haven't. I'll just have to take it all at face value because although I've played three or four times, I've already decided there are more entertaining ways to spend an evening than grinding the same two or three mobs for incremental advances and identical drops. And that's at level three.

Camping a single spawn for a quest drop. Two more mobs trained on me by another player. Both of us dead in a second. Brings back so many memories. Sadly, none of them good...

Part of the problem is the extreme dichotomy between what the game looks like it's going to be and what it is. It looks like a cheerful, cartoon-colorful knockabout MMO aimed at a younger-than-average audience. You come to it expecting a light-hearted, unchallenging romp and you get something that plays like EQ circa 1999. Only more so.

As several commenters point out, this is not likely to sit well with the audience it's sure to attract, particularly as a cross-platform game appearing on Android and iOS. This final quote neatly sums up the situation:

"I have not even touched the game for weeks now, simply because of all the issues with the XP curve, progression difficulty curve and combat system. If they can't even hope to keep their already loyal players entertained at this point, then the game will most likely not survive the general public".

It's not that AQ3D is a bad MMO. Not at all. It has a great feel, tons of personality, huge potential. Neither is it that there's no audience for a game that harks back in difficulty and challenge to the world as it was before WoW. Lord knows there have been enough calls for that Return to Values for years now.

In fact, there's nothing very much wrong here that can't be fixed with some tuning, tweaking and a general reality check. The game probably could use at least the rest of the year in Closed Beta, where major changes could be rolled out and rescinded as required, after which it would stand a good chance of launching to resounding applause.

Once it goes to Open Beta, though, the reviews and Let's Plays and Steam Ratings will roll in, like it or not. On this evidence, launching as it stands, that verdict could be as harsh on the game-makers as the game itself is on the players.

Summer Fun : GW2, WoW,

Over these last few weeks it seemed as though I was settling into the kind of gaming routine I'd been hoping for, juggling half a dozen MMOs and pottering around from one to another at whim. A few things have conspired to obstruct that happy state of affairs but not in a bad way.

For one thing I have been playing slightly less overall. It is summer, after all, and the weather has finally decided to admit it. It's not quite as tempting to sit in all day playing games when the sun is streaming through the window. Plus I've been working late most days this week so that cuts into the available gaming time.

Then comes the choice of which games to play. Factors to be considered include an increased attendance and interest in GW2 from Mrs Bhagpuss, who added Heart of Thorns to her second account and is now busy gearing up a whole new set of characters, a much better WvW match than we've had for a while and some very enjoyable new content that came with the Out of the Shadows update.

The upshot has been a week of nothing much but GW2. Even the pre-Legion fun over in Azeroth hasn't managed to pull me away although I do want to get to it at some point before it's all over, if only to try out the "Dark Whispers" fun Tyler mentioned in the comments.

I also need to log both the All Access accounts into Legends of Norrath one last time before the shutters go down for the final time on the seventeenth. Contrary to what was expected it seems there was a final stipend at the beginning of the month so I still have a last hand to collect.

At least I don't have to worry over whether or not to fork out for No Man's Sky. This could have been the summer of non-MMO gaming for me, with We Happy Few entering early access and NMS launching, but it seems both aren't ready for PC prime-time quite yet. Going to wait until the bugs are all ironed out and the gameplay's plumped up before I lay down any money for either, I think.

In the meantime GW2 is doing a surprisingly good job of keeping me entertained despite what can at best be described as a thin period for new content. Although the Summer Update, which is officially all we are getting in the way of New Stuff for at least two months, only really took a matter of days to run through it has more lasting appeal for me. I really like the new map and for once I want the items you can acquire by grinding playing there.

Better yet, the "Current Event" that came with the following bi-weekly update is a good one. Well, I'm enjoying it although I know that's not a universally-held opinion. The way in which ANet are able to turn excitement into frustration is depressingly predictable. As seems to happen more often than not some poorly-designed mechanics left players first puzzled then annoyed as large groups gathered and stood around waiting for anything up to three hours for events that didn't happen.

It's clear that the people designing these events still don't have a handle on the psychology of the players who they are designing them for even after four years of seeing how they react every. single. time. If you create an event with rewards or achievements a huge proportion of players will try to complete those achievements and gain those rewards in the minimum number of attempts at the fastest pace.

If that means standing around doing nothing for literally hours waiting on 30 seconds of action then that's what they will do. They won't like it. They won't enjoy it. They will complain about it. But they will do it. What they won't do is carry on playing normally and allow the achievements to fill themselves out over time and the rewards to arrive whenever.

Repeatedly designing events that expect behavior that the playerbase as a whole has never exhibited throughout the lifetime of the game is either incredibly stubborn or incredibly unobservant. Or maybe it's pure wishful thinking; "They'll get it this time, won't they?"

Well, no they won't. And it doesn't help when you give them something to click that tells them the opposite of what they think it's telling them, either. At least it only took a day or so to hot-fix that - an improvement on the days of denial we've suffered over similar design flaws in the past.

Despite all that I had a good time chasing down my Bloodstone Sightings and Bloodstone-Crazed Creatures. I had them all in a couple of sessions and the longest I waited around was about an hour, during which there was good party going on with fun boxes and fireworks.

I still have to find all the Bloodstone Slivers but that's the easy part. I just haven't gotten around to it yet because I am the kind of dilettante, whim-driven player the devs apparently wish they were making this stuff to entertain.

I did collect my 5,000 unbound magic and earn my 200 blood rubies to buy the Ascended back item although I have yet to decide who gets to use it. I'm currently stockpiling more for the jewellery although I may not spend it just yet. I believe these currencies will be in play for the whole of Living Story 3 so there may be better things to buy later. That_shaman knows but I prefer not to spoil my fun by peeking ahead.

Looking ahead I'm hoping to return to something of a more balanced MMO diet as the summer wears down and we head into autumn. The long-delayed arrival of Project Gorgon on Steam is supposedly due "soon" so there's that. Again, I might opt to wait a little longer and glean the benefit of the promised optimization and graphical improvements before wading in.

P:G is one of the few upcoming MMOs that eschew the action/console controls for traditional hotbar and tab target, a very strong selling point for me. The other one I have my eye on is AdventureQuest 3D. AQ3D, like P:G seems to be another MMO with a very quirky, humorous approach led by a strong, individual personality, but it has a considerably larger team with an established track record so I'm expecting great things. Or things, anyway.

It seems I've been saying this every year for the lifetime of this blog but despite the never-ending pronouncements of doom and gloom for the entire MMO genre, there is always far more on the table than I am ever going to be able to consume. If this is a dying hobby then god forbid I ever move to one that's on the up.