It's Real If I Say It's Real

Yeebo dropped by the comment thread on the last post I wrote about Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, to mention how he'd started playing Honkai Star Rail a while back and was somewhat enjoying it, until he spotted a sale on Neir: Automata, which he'd heard described as "one of the best games ever created by humans". And that was it for his time with HSR.

That got me thinking about a lot of things, some of which came up in my reply, like how I really never get on with the combat in Honkai Star Rail and how any combat that isn't really easy puts me right off any game these days. Then I got to thinking about my gaming habits in general and how they've changed, both over the whole of my life and more specifically in the last few years.

I was going to write something quite specifically related to that today but then before I got down to it, I read this article at NME about a large-scale survey commissioned by French music streaming platform Deezer to find out if listeners really can tell the difference between music made by AI and music made by humans. And this one at GamesIndustry about the absence of player pushback over the use of AI in mobile games. And this one from the same source about Nexon suggesting everyone should assume every game company is using AI...

All of which made me think even more. Which is why this post is all over the place. I'm still thinking. But I have to start somewhere...

Let's begin with the shift from MMORPGs to Open World RPGs and Open World Survival Games, which for simplicity's sake I am going to lump together. I could also have linked a bunch of articles on that but I'm going to stick to my personal experience and some general observations because why do proper research when you can just wing it? That's how all the best columnists do it, anyway.

It seems hard to argue that these kinds of games, gacha or otherwise, haven't largely eaten the MMORPG sector's lunch. Still  as Sony/NCSoft's announcement of the in-development Horizon MMORPG, Steel Frontiers, proves, there is still a degree of interest in and commitment to the genre outside of its established, specialist niche market. MassivelyOP, who always nitpick over genre tags, were very keen to point out the acronym "MMORPG" appears right there in the title screen. 

And it is something worth mentioning. A lot of developers and publishers in recent years have gone out of their way to call their games anything but MMORPGs, believing to do so would harm their chances in the wider market.

Is that true? No idea. How would I know? Certainly, every new AAA game that claims to be an MMORPG seems to attract a million players on launch day. But then 90% of them are gone in a month and the rest a month after that. 

Was it because the games weren't MMORPG enough? Too MMORPG? Just not very good? Or were most of those people only there because it was the Big New Thing and a Thing can only be Big and New for so long?

Search me. No idea. And neither do the devs, apparently, because it keeps on happening.

What I can say, though, is that the naming of things is important. We should all know that as fantasy fans. To know a thing's name is to control it. 

Why, though? Why does a name, a true name, hold so much power?

It's all about authenticity, isn't it? That elusive, nebulous, indefinable quality that we know when we feel it. The Massively editorial team knows when a game is an MMORPG, regardless of what the press release they just received tells them. Just like we all know an NPC we're listening to was voiced by a human, not by AI. 

Except, do we? I can't help but think of the old Coke vs Pepsi test. That wasn't a notional thought experiment. It wasn't even something set up in some side-room in a University somewhere. It was an actual, physical test you or I could try for ourselves, when we went into town to buy an album or some new trainers.

If you search "Pepsi Challenge" you'll get the idea it only happened in America but I remember seeing the van parked in the shopping precinct near the bus and railway station in a city where I lived. I just can't remember which city... 

I didn't try it myself but I was always absolutely certain I could tell the difference. Pepsi is a lot sweeter than Coke, to my taste at least. Now, if it had been Coke vs Canada Dry, my all-time favorite cola, I'm not so sure. 

Which is kind of the point. Maybe I can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Certainly, to me, they don't really taste all that similar. Between Coke and Canada Dry cola, though? Those two are so close I wouldn't like to put money on it.

Whether I can tell or not, though, I think I know. Do I want to put it to the test? Not really. Why would I want to find out I was wrong? How would that make my life any better?

I have listened to a lot of music in my life and until very recently all of it was made by humans. There wasn't really any other option. Despite that intense and continued exposure, I don't doubt that, like 97% of the 9,000 people Ipsos tested for Deezer, I would not reliably be able to differentiate between music produced by AI and music produced by humans.

Mrs Bhagpuss says she can. She really likes the music I've made with AI but she says it all sounds "pink". She can hear the pinkness in it the way some people see auras. I cannot hear the pinkness. I did think about playing her something extremely similar that was made by humans to see if she still thought it sounded pink but that's an experiment that's going to stay firmly in my thoughts only.

She also says the vocals sound "too perfect".  I hadn't noticed that but after she pointed it out... I still couldn't hear it. What I think I can hear is the AI being imperfect on purpose sometimes, which isn't the same thing at all. And I certainly couldn't pick an AI singer out of an audio line-up based on perceived flaws.

But then, the AI vocals I'm listening to, the ones in the songs I've caused to be made, like a Renaissance artist overseeing a workshop filled with talented but anonymous craftsmen, are my vocals. The imperfections are frequently my imperfections, replicated as though they were intended.

I remember Tipa, who also uses Suno, mentioning a while ago that, while she liked the music she made with the software, she hadn't found much she wanted to listen to by anyone else there. I'd go further than that. I haven't heard anything there that I haven't found intensely irritating. The app defaults to playing the next tune on some playlist or other if you don't stop it, so I've been forced to hear snippets of lots of AI tunes and there hasn't been a single one I haven't almost broken the keyboard trying to silence.

But is that because they don't sound like they were made by humans or because they're just terrible songs? I could do much the same on YouTube and many of the tunes would be "authentic". They'd just be awful. A lot of people who can't play an instrument or sing also have terrible taste in music. Suno lets them share their lack of talent with the world, too. AI is really egalitarian that way.

What are we really lookng for when we listen to music or look at images or play video games, anyway? Authenticity or entertainment? Is a real, bad thing better than an artificial, good thing? And anyway, what even is authenticity?

At the moment I prefer Open World RPGs to MMORPGs and I prefer Eastern games to Western games. I'm not saying this is a permanent change or even a lasting one. It's a snapshot, like all preferences. It may stick or it may slide.

Looking at that preference as objectively as a person can observe a subjective preference of their own, I'd question some of the assumed positions on authenticity that come up repeatedly when games and especially RPGs are being discussed. There's long been a trend in the discourse over automation. It predates any queasiness over the use of generative AI, although that does seem to have intensified the and polarized the debate considerably.

MMO players in the West have tended to react very negatively to many of the things that are currently drawing me towards both open world RPGs and mobile ports and which a few years ago led me to appreciate a number of imported games that were calling themselves MMORPGs.  

One day I'll write a proper post about why I like these sorts of games but for now, here are a few of the more obvious reasons. 

 

I like the brighter colors and the flatter surfaces of the graphics, for a start. I like the cleaner textures. A lot of older or more traditional MMORPGs look gritty, somehow. Dirty, even. I can deal with that look but I'd rather not have to.

I like the stories, which seem a lot more modern and relatable than those in Western games. The characters are younger and more enthusiastic. The themes are stronger; the emotions clearer. 

There's a tendency to call them "anime" games but they could as easily be called "YA" games instead. I read a lot of YA novels (The acronym stands for Young Adult, marketing-speak for what publishers used to call "teen fiction".) and the characters in many of the games I'm now darting between remind me very much of the ones I meet in those books.

Ironically, these games, clearly aimed at a younger demographic than the traditional Western MMORPG, also tend to have a lot more time and respect for older characters. In most of the MMORPGs I've played, the characters are much of a muchness when it comes to age. 

The Elves all live forever so they're ageless. The dwarves are all old even if they're young. The humans are inevitably somewhere in their 30s or 40s. The anthropomorphic races (And the gnomes.) tend to be child-like. Mostly, though, unless a character has to be a specific age for a plot point, age barely even rates a mention.

The open world rpgs and anime games give me stories across the full age range, from small children to the elderly. And those stories frequently reflect the kinds of concerns real people in those age ranges would have. It's not all gods and mosnters. Sometimes it's homework or rivalries at work or the way your hip doesn't want to let you climb the stairs like you used to.

That feels more authentic to me but I'm betting it's a black mark against authenticity for anyone looking for the traditional, high fantasy MMORPG experience. Still, a lack of authenticity in the story is nothing compared to what happens in the gameplay. 

As I said at the start of the post, I bounced off Honkai Star Rail partly because I found the combat too much like hard work. I dropped Genshin Impact because I literally couldn't beat a boss to carry on with the story. Not all of these games have Combat For Babies enabled. Just the ones I like.

After a quarter of a century and more, I think I can say I'm officially over finding combat in MMORPGs fun for its own sake. I never liked it that much but it did used to have its moments. Now, it's almost always a means to an end. The easier it is, the better I like it. I like one-shotting mobs. All of them, if possible.

The received wisdom is that making combat too easy turns players off. They get bored and go somewhere else if the challenge isn't there. Not me. I get bored and go somewhere else if the challenge is there. One of the things I like best about BP:SR is the auto-combat. I use it in every fight. It's even better than one-shotting mobs because I don't even have to press a key.

Except I do press some keys, sometimes, because that's fun, too. I dodge a bit now and then. Jump about. Change position. Not sure if it makes any difference but it makes me feel like I'm involved. Because you want to feel like you're doing something, don't you? You just don't always want it to be true. 

Authenticity is in your head. There may be an objective reality out there but you do not have access to it. You think Coke tastes better than Pepsi because your eyes tell you so when you see the label on the bottle. Your taste buds have no say in it.  

That NPC you hear, the one that sounds so flat and uninflected? It might be AI. Or it might be a voice actor who isn't doing such a great job. That song you like? The one that came up on that auto-generated playlist that's by someone you never heard of before. Are you sure it's a real person singing? 

Yes, you know. Of course you know. But how are you ever going to know?

And what about the fun you had, playing that game?  No, wait...   

I won't say the fun you had. You may not have had that fun. I'll say what about the fun I had, playing that game where the AI (Different kind of AI, of course. The old, good kind.) did all the fighting for me. It even did the running, there and back. All I had to do was take the quest and hand it in. Did I really have fun or was I just imagining it?

Maybe I was having more fun all those times I spent an hour trying to beat some stupid boss in a Guild Wars 2 Living World instance. One of those times I lost so often all my armor fell off and I had to give up and leave. That time I had a headache for an hour afterwards. When I felt like uninstalling the damn game, I hated it so much. 

That was some authentic gameplay there, right?

Yeah, I don't miss any of that. What is authentic isn't the experience but  how I feel about it. If the game feels like it was fun, it was fun. If the song sounds good, it's good. If the voice acting is convincing, it's convincing. 

And that would appear to be why I prefer the games I prefer just now. They're authentically entertaining. Whether they're any good...

Well, that's an entirely different question. 

Blue Protocol: Star Resonance - Death And Fractures

The elderly PC I'm limping along with until Black Friday arrives and I buy myself a new one is surprisingly happy to play most games I've tried, including a few I didn't expect it to be able to run. Most surprising of all is Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, a game that only came to the West a few weeks ago and which I thought would be well ouside my old PC's comfort range.

Instead, it runs beautifully. Smooth as ice cream and as cool. The fans don't even start up. Which is a good thing because BP:SR is my go-to game just now.

Not that that's saying much. My gaming time is still way down, although I expect that to change as soon as I get a new computer. But when I do decide to play something, Blue Protocol is what I choose.

There are a few reasons. One is indeed that it runs well but that's kind of a passive buff. It wouldn't be enough on its own. 

Another passive is that the world is very nice to look at. Better than I realised at first, when I thought the visuals looked a bit under-cooked compared to similar titles like Genshin Impact or Wuthering Waves. I still think there's less detail but the slightly washed-out, pastel color palette has grown on me and now I think it looks subtle and sophisticated rather than bland.

A third, more active reason I'm enjoying BP:SR is the gameplay. It's engaging but very low-key, a combination that suits me perfectly at the moment. 

I've noticed in recent times, when I'm doing First Impressions posts or generally recounting my experiences with newer games, that I quite often make mention of there not being all that much combat in them. I'm not sitting here with a stop-watch and an abacus, counting and timing the fights I have in every session, but my strong feeling is that since I started the game I've hardly had to do any fighting at all.

That leads me on to the main reason I'm playing and enjoying Blue Protocol, which is the story. It isn't original or even particularly compelling but it makes sense and it's linear, meaning I can follow it both literally and metaphorically. And while it may not be a great story, it's entertaining enough for me to want to know what happens next.

The narrative also takes some unexpected turns once in a while. Disturbingly enough in one case that there probably ought to be a trigger warning.

This next part is going to get pretty spoilery so it might be time to quit reading if you plan on playing and care about plot twists and the like. Also, I wouldn't even look at the screenshots in the rest of the post if I was you. Just in case.

Okay, now those folks have left us, let's get to it.

Fairly early on in the plot, as the player character, you run into a brash and mouthy kid called Narulo, who claims to be a hero. He challenges you to a competition and gets roundly beaten because you are a hero and he's just a kid but he still claims you ought to be his sidekick rather than the other way around.

This goes on for a while, with the kid popping up numerous times to make brash or outrageous claims, but as the story moves along he starts to realize how outclassed he is and what a mistake he made by thinking he could match up to you in the first place. The two of you then start to develop a very comfortable kind of big sister/little brother relationship, aided and abetted by some of the other NPCs, and the whole thing gets to feel very cosy.

Then some bad stuff happens and, as they say, shit gets real. A war starts and the part of town where the kid lives gets reduced to rubble. He steps up and becomes the hero he pretended to be, helping the refugees to safety, which is what he's doing when you arrive.

You makes several attempts to persuade him to get somewhere safe himself, while you go off to deal with the crisis, what with you being a true and actual hero and all, and he tells you he will. But then, of course, he doesn't. He finishef getting everyone out of the danger area, then doubles back and tags along behind you, keeping out of sight until eventually you discover him, hiding in a barrel.

By this time it's too late for him to get out of the combat area. You're too deep in and it would be more dangerous for him to go back on his own than to stay, so you very reluctantly agree to let him stick around, so long as he stays close, does what he's told and keeps out of trouble.

And he kind of does. At least, he's well back when the big fight with the boss starts. Just not far back enough. 

I wasn't even sure what happened, to be honest. It was very fast. I think he heroically but idiotically rushed in to save me from being struck  by lightning from behind, only to be burned to a crisp himself but some of the dialog later suggested he was just too close and got hit by sheer bad luck. 

Either way, he's dead. Which was a shock. I certainly wasn't expecting it.  And it had some impact. The narrative tends to be thin, as in there isn't a great wealth of detail and discussion the way there is in Wuthering Waves, but what there is absolutely hits all the nodal points it needs to establish an emotional reaction. The writers do the work and the effect they're going for lands.

It's not unusual in a game like this. Setting up a sympathetic character to reap the emotional payoff when you kill them is Storytelling 101 for RPGs. 

What doesn't tend to happen is having to deal with the fallout. It felt a lot less like a cliche when I met a middle-aged couple later a short while later, in the course of what seemed like an entirely unrelated sequence, and found out in the course of a conversation about something else that they were the kid's parents. 

And that they didn't know he was dead. And that I had to decide whether or not to tell them. It didn't help that the parents had just been talking about how their son was late and how worried they were about him. 

It occurred to me about then that the slightly etiolated nature of the prose was a good thing. It offered some protection against getting too emotionally evolved. Otherwise that part really might not have been much fun at all.

All of which is just an example of why I'm finding the story worth paying some attention. When something like that crops up it does make you wonder what might be coming next. 

Although what actually did come next, or pretty soon after, was a comedy moment that made me laugh out loud. It also worked well as a counterpoint to the tragedy the PC and her friends had just witnessed, which was clearly the writers' intention. 

What happens is that there's another big fight, during which another of your new friends gets crushed by the boss, rushing in to save you. He ends up flat on his back on the grass. He's lying there, saying his last emotional goodbyes and making something of a meal of it, when another of your pals points out  he's just broken a bone or two and  he's going to be fine as soon as the healers get their hands on him. Bathos as catharsis. Clever writing.

I bet it works even better in the original Japanese. The translations in BP:SR are decent but not entirely idiomatic. I've seen much, much worse, though. Whoever's behind these is doing more than enough to bring the emotional weight across. Still, I bet it's better in the ur-text.

So much for the quality of the story, which I would describe as being consistently at least as good as it needs to be and frequently quite a lot better. How's it for quantity, though?

Pretty good. There's a lot more story than I was expecting. I seem to remember reading it was short but it's not feeling that way. Steam says I have more than eleven hours played and I can't actually remember doing anything other than following the MSQ.  

I really haven't done any exploring other than what I've had to do to get from one story location to the next. I haven't done any crafting. I learned how to fish but I doubt I've spent more than ten minutes doing it. 

I haven't even spent any significant time on upgrading my gear or spending my talent points. As I said earlier, combat has featured so rarely up to now that I've not felt the need to improve anything. The few fights there have been seem either to be with trash mobs that pose no challenge or with bosses where the result is scripted anyway. Why bother upgrading when you don't need to?

There's a boatload of other things I could be doing, as in all these sorts of games, but so far I've found more than enough to keep me occupied just following the plot. I'm happy to carry on like that for now, although at some point I'm sure the game will have other ideas.

When I last logged out I left Floradelle standing outside a pair of huge gates, disguised as a member of an isolated, secretive tribe, waiting  to go through them into a Forbidden Zone. Maybe that'll be a dungeon with a lot of fighting and I'll finally have to sort out her gear and spend her talent points.

I'm betting it won't, though. I bet it'll be a lot more chatting and maybe some sneaking and eavesdropping, with a little light puzzle-solving on the side. 

And that will suit me just fine.

Blue Protocol: Star Resonance - Final First Impressions

The plan for today's post was to run through the demos I'd picked for the latest Steam Next Fest, which starts today and runs for a week. Unfotunately, in making that plan I hadn't allowed for the fact that it doesn't kick off until 10AM PAcific, which is six o'clock in the evening here. That wouldn't be too late for me to pick and post but it would turn the whole thing into a bit of a race so I'm going to leave it for tomorrow.

All of which means it's yet another First impressions post for Blue Protocol: Star Resonance. Yay!

I guess at some point First Impressions have to give way to plain old Impressions. I think we might be getting close to that point now. I've racked up just short of five hours, which is nothing for an MMORPG, but I'm level 26 and I've finished the first chapter of the main story quest so it feels as though I'm well into the game.

And so far I'm really enjoying it. I realised yesterday why I've seen several reviews comparing it to Final Fantasy XIV.  I though at first it was just that it's an MMO and that happened to be the one those reviewers knew best because certainly BP:SR doesn't seem to play much like the FFXIV I remember. Then, as I was trotting around Asterleeds, the main city, I started to notice how similar the architecture is to some of the locations I vaguely remember from that game.

It's been a long time since I saw any of the cities of Eorzea so I'm vague on which, if any, Asterleeds might specifically ressemble. It's more the look and feel, all that wood paneling, the way the NPCs stand behind counters, the wide streets... True, lots of cities in lots of MMOs have a similar design aesthetic but I can't say any of them have reminded me of FFXIV quite as much as this.

There's also the catalog of creatures to kill, something I recall playing a significant part in FFXIV but again, lots of games have something similar. If there are any more specific similarities, I imagine you'd need to be more tuned in to Square Enix's game than I am to spot them. Still, it's a factor for some people, clearly.

One thing BP:SR doesn't seem to do all that well is introduce players to new features and systems as they come up. It's not that it doesn't do it at all, more that it tends to mention them and move on quite quickly to something else.

Arguably, that's a positive rather than a negative. The usual tendency for modern games is to keep banging on about things until you never want to hear about them ever again. This way, it's left up to the player to do something with the information, which at least suggests some agency.

For example, I'm pretty sure there was a suggestion at some point that I go speak to some NPC about crafting. It wasn't put as obviously as that and I didn't do anything about it but later, as I was going through some icons and menus to see what was there, I came across a whole page of Life Skills, all with details of who to speak to to get started.

That led me to check my Quest Journal for the first time, where I found I had no fewer than sixteen pending quests, only two of which I remembered acquiring. There's a quest tracker but it only seems to highlight a couple of quests at a time.

Most of this is my fault, not the game's. For a few years now, I seem to have slipped into the habit of pursuing the MSQ or core storyline in every new game I try, very much to the detriment of the game as a whole. It's not something I ever used to do and I'm not really sure when or why I changed my behavior. 

I suspect it's simply because most modern MMORPGs and open-world RPGs have strong central storylines and put them in front of you from the get-go. If you don't actively choose to step off the moving walkway, it will carry you through the content it wants you to be consuming without giving you much choice.

 

It's probably one reason why there's a perception that these kinds of games don't have as much going on in them as they once did. As you complete chapter after chapter of the big storyline, there's an inevitable sense that you're making your way along a linear path, exactly like watching a movie or reading a book. When you get to the credits or turn the final page, it feels like the game is over.

That's possibly also why side quests seem to be so looked down upon these days. It's quite common to hear people complaining about them in the way they complain about trash mobs. There are too many; it's boring to have to go through them; why can't it all just be the MSQ?

If you go back far enough, there didn't used to be such a harsh definition, either of quests or mobs. Without a dominant central questline, quests were more likely to seem interesting or worthwhile in their own right, either for the smaller stories they told, or for the xp or rewards they gave. Mobs, similarly, were more likely to have drops you might want or to give xp you might need, so it didn't seem like such an imposition to have to kill them on the way to doing other things.

I've always thought the increased focus on story and on a central, obligatory MSQ was as much a problem as a solution. Yes, it keeps players both engaged and occupied but it also fosters the idea that once you're done with the story, you're done with the game. All that's left after that is a so-called end-game that's inevitably and unavoidably repetitive. For all the complaints about the "grind" of leveling in old-school MMORPGs , it's hard to see the current version as very much of an improvement. Or even all that different.

This, I'm uncomfortably aware, is the hole I've lowered myself into in Wuthering Waves. That game has a wealth of very satisfying and engaging content beyond the excellent MSQ and when I first started playing it I was having a fine old time exploring it all. At some point, though, I locked myself into the central storyline and the rest of the fascinating world disappeared behind a screen of (Admittedly first-rate.) cut scenes and set pieces.

 

BP:SR is never going to have the same inherent literary or aesthetic value as the exceptional WW but the story running through the middle of it is still interesting enough to hold my attention and the game constantly nudges me to keep on with it to the exclusion of all else. Those nudges, though, are gentler and less persistent than in most games and that's why I'm here now, considering my options.

When I play again later today, I think I'm going to open up my Journal and start working through a few of those quests I seem to have picked up without even noticing. Maybe they'll be filler I wish I'd skipped or maybe they'll be satisfying vignettes that shed light on the world Floradelle finds herself living in. Mostly, I suspect, they'll introduce me to aspects of the game I ought to know about.

One of them, for instance, introduces Fishing, which appears to be something entirely separate from Life Skills. There's another similarity with FFXIV.  At least Fishing is always pretty straightforward. You know where you are with a fish.

Life Skills or Crafts are always a problem. In some games they're barely more than amusements and it makes no real difference which you pick but in others choosing the wrong one can be almost game-breaking. I've never known any game give sufficient information up front to make that choice a truly informed one. It's always outside sources that tell you Class A must take Craft B and Craft B needs Secondary Craft C.

All of which means I've already reached the point where I ought to do some research outside the game before I make any final decisions. Luckily, BP:SR is one of those games where there's plenty of advice available. 

 

Here's an overview of Life Skills. You'll note it says right at the start that they're "a core part" of the game, "important for progressing your character". Not just fluff for fun, then. A detailed guide to one of them, Weaving, makes it clear why that is: "Weaving allows you to craft Epic and Legendary quality Intellect and Agility Helmets, Armor, Gauntlets, and Boots for the Verdant Oracle, Beat Performer, Frost Mage, Stormblade, and Marksman classes, as well as Strength, Intellect, and Agility Charms."

That does sound like it would be important. Fortunately, as Icy Veins explains, "You’re not locked into just one or two professions. You can pick up as many Life Skills as you want". The real limitation here is something called Focus, one of those infamous time-gated resources. 

I think I prefer being able to learn all the crafts but not always having the energy to do them to always having enough puff but being locked into specific skills. I suppose being able to take them all and never having any limitations on their use would be the ideal but even that would present problems of its own in terms of the investment and commitment required to take advantage of that degree of freedom.

There's probably no perfect solution. So long as whatever's there seems fair within its context, it ought to be acceptable. Based on previous experiences in similar games, in my case, it's highly unlikely I'll ever do enough crafting to run up against the timegates, so from my perspective it will probably seem like I have complete freedom anyway.

Unless I really get into the housing, that is. Oh yes, there's housing! And you can craft furniture. That is the one place where I've found myself hitting the limits in the past.

 

I thought I'd gained access to the housing feature yesterday, when the Mayor of Asterleeds gave me a rent-free room in the inn for as long as I needed it, in gratitude for a service I'd done the city. I went straight to my room to see if that had opened up some customization features but the only change I found there was another player, asleep on my bed.

Which was weird. I thought at first it might be an NPC, like the ones that moved themselves into my houses all the time in Chimeraland but no, it was definitely a player. So much for it being my room. I expect he'd saved the city, too.

That got me to go look up housing and it turns out the feature doesn't open up until Level 40. Whatever the Mayor gave me, it wasn't that. Knowing it's coming is a big motivation for me to carry on until I get the real thing, though.

The one other significant thing I did while I was playing yesterday was to join in a big fight with an open world boss or an elite or something. I was out doing something entirely different when I saw the huge creature wandering about. I went over to have a look and a couple of people were attacking it so I joined in.

It was all very reminiscent of similar events in Guild Wars 2 or perhaps more specifically in Bless Unleashed, although in the latter game the fights were a lot harder. This one, some species of Ogre, had a lot of hit points, so it took several minutes to kill, even with a lot of players joining in as the fight went on. There didn't seem to be any complicated mechanics to deal with. The boss fired off plenty of AEs but as a Marksman, using a bow, I was positioned well out of range so I can't say what they did.

It was fun. For me. I really like open group events where all you do is stand still, firing off all your skills over and over. I like it even better with auto-battling, when I don't even have to hold down a key, much less go through any kind of rotation. I can see why it's not to everyone's taste but as I said yesterday, there are lots of games out there; if that's not your kick, maybe try another.

Everything considered, I'm finding the propspects for BP:SR quite encouraging. There's not much about it I don't like yet and a lot that I do. It probably doesn't have a lot of substance but evidence suggests that several fairly recent games I ended up giving a lot of my time didn't, either. Noah's Heart and Dawnlands come immediately to mind but there have been quite a few. I'm pretty shallow when it comes to games.

Most of those games, though, didn't do all that well. Some of them have closed down now and the rest are mouldering in maintenance mode, forgotten by the world. I have some hope Blue Protocol: Star Resonance might do a little better than that but it's early days yet.

And with that, I think my First Impressions are probably done. From now, it'll just be notes on a game I'm playing. 

Blue Protocol: Star Resonance - More First Impressions

How's Blue Protocol: Star Resonance going then? That's what your all asking, isn't it? Isn't it? Well, I'm going to tell you anyway.

It's going pretty well as far as I can make out. As I write, at just before nine in the morning, UK time, on a Sunday, there are almost forty-six thousand people playing on Steam (Sixty-two thousand as I edit this at five PM.) from an all-time peak of just under eighty thousand. It's clearly holding an audience for the time being. Recent history for just about all MMORPGs released on Steam in the last couple of years suggests another month will see a huge fall-off in numbers but maybe this will be the sticky exception to that unfortunate trend. 

At this point, I was going to make a comparison with Crystal of Atlan, a somewhat similar game that launched back at the beginning of summer and which I was playing quite regularly, until suddenly I wasn't. Unfortunately, the Steam chart for that game isn't working. It brings up an "Internal Server Error", something I've never seen before.  

And guess why that is. I just figured it out. Crystal of Atlan isn't on Steam! I've been playing it through it's own standalone launcher for which I have a desktop icon. But I have lots of desktop icons for Steam games too so that's easy to forgive. I'm so used to everything I play being on Steam I just assume that's where everything that's not really old is going, even if I'm clicking my desktop to get there.

So how if it's not on Steam, how come the Steam chart even recognizes Crystal of Atlan to give me the error message? Shouldn't it just be telling me it doesn't exist? That turns out to be because CoA is coming to Steam in just over two weeks, on the 30 October.  I don't know if it's going to be possible to link an existing account to Steam when it happens but I hope so. I might start playing again then.

Let's get back to BP:SR. That's what we're here for, after all. The numbers look good. How about the reviews? Those were very bad for a while. Have they improved?

 

Yep. A lot. The overall rating is "Mixed" now from a shade under five thousand reviews, of which 48% are positive. That's not so much mixed as polarized. It's too soon for there to be a "Recent" filter - all the reviews are "recent", the game not having been out for a week yet - but the selection of new reviews highlighted on the main page seem far less hysterical, whether they recommend the game or not.

It would seem logical that all the pile-ons who never planned on playing the game, the ones who only wanted to have a bit of cruel fun poking it with a stick, have moved on to the next target, leaving mostly people who actually want to give the game a fair shake. And most of those players are saying things like "It's pretty fun for what it is: a casual oriented F2P anime MMO" and "Free to play anime mmo with gatch. Not bad for what it is." 

Even the negative reviews are far more balanced now, often making some positive points before concluding the game isn't for them. There's praise for the visuals, the cosmetics, the world-building, the characters and even, in a minority of cases, the gameplay and combat. The main issues people can't seem to get over are the time-gating, the myriad currencies and the general mobile free-to-playness of the whole shebang.

Which is fair. Both the negatives and the positives are in harmony there. It's a port of a Chinese F2P mobile MMO that's had some, but not a lot, of work done to fit it for a PC audience. If you're cool with that, then BP:SR is a decent game. If you're not, it's annoying and not worth your time. Seems reasonable.

There was one review that really stood out for me, though. It's very short. I'll quote it in full.

"Really boring game I ever played. Just more talk than action anything. This game really not interesting if just more talk and no action."

I totally see where the writer is coming from, although I disagree strongly with their conclusion. I have just over three and a half hours played now and I would estimate no more than ten or fifteen minutes of that has been spent fighting mobs or bosses. An action MMO it is not.

 

Travel, which often bulks out the played time in any kind of open world game, isn't taking up the slack either. There's the usual amount of running about but the distances involved are very small. Frequently, the next person you need to speak to is standing right across the street from where you are. New locations you have to visit are often less than fifty yards away. There are teleport points everywhere but as yet it hasn't even been worth using them.

No, almost all of my three and a half hours has been spent either talking to NPCs or listening to them talk to each other. There are some proper, animated cut scenes but far more of those tableaus where you see all the characters standing in the foreground having long conversations to which you are occasionally invited to contribute.

"More talk than action" is a very accurate description of the gameplay so far. Whether you find that boring or entertaining will be entirely down to your personal preferences. Personally, I've been enjoying it quite a bit. It's not great literature, even by gaming standards, but it's witty in places, light-hearted and cheerful and it's largely been a pleasure letting it all drift past as I watch and read.

I see from some of the other reviews that the "end game" involves a lot of repeated dungeon-running, for which you need energy of some kind as is the norm in these games. That's why people are complaining about the time-gating. I don't know how long it takes to get to that point, although if people are complaining about it already it can't be very long. I've seen five hours mentioned although that seems very fast to complete a full main story quest. 

It's very likely my experience is going to be the reverse of what the commenter I quoted above was complaining about. I imagine I'll find the part when the talk stops and the action begins to be the boring bit. I certainly won't be running any dungeons more than once or twice, that's for sure. It's more likely I won't set foot in them at all unless the story demands it and even then they'd better be easy or I'll be off.

I am clearly not the real target market for the games I enjoy, which is a bit weird when I think about it. It's not just that I'm too old for them, although obviously I am. I completed a survey for the game last night and the upper age limit was 36+. I was older than that when I started playing online games, back in the 90s!

I tend to like the parts of these games I suspect the intended audience would prefer weren't there at all. The pointless busy-work of the side quests, the derivitive and poorly-writen storylines, the unecessary cross-country travel, the myriad crafting mats I pick up and then leave in storage and never use...

And I like seeing the sights and taking holiday snaps with the quirky in-game cameras. BP:SR has one of those and it's quite good although I haven't quite figured out exactly how all the controls work quite yet. I'm having fun playing around with them though. I'll be trying the Selfie option next so there's something to look forward to.

Another thing I've seen plenty of complaints about are the many currencies the game uses. Someone on Steam made a handy list:

Rose Orb
Rose Orb (Bound)
Luno
Luno (Bound)
Meowlux Premium Card
Meow Coin
Meowlux Vault Card
Meowlux Wish Coin
Homestead Coins
Friendship Points
Honor Coin
Will Wish Coin
Asteria Reputation
Season 1 Points (SRP)
Silver Star Badge

My reaction on seeing it? You call that a lot?? Also, you think it's just imported mobile F2P games that do this?? Think again, pal!

Here's a link to the wiki page listing all the EverQuest II currencies. There are sixty-seven of them and I'm not convinced that list is complete. And in case you're thinking, well EQII is a F2P game too, here's an article PC Gamer ran earlier this year about the five hundred (!) currencies that you might come across in World of Warcraft. 

So far I've only seen two currencies in BP:SR, Luno and Rose Orb, both Bound, I think. It hardly seems like something worth calling the game out for. 

Enough about what other people are saying. What about me? 

I've been having fun. I'm looking forward to getting back to... erm, what's the world called again... ah, yes, Regnus, that's it. (Had to look it up...) Levels come very fast, which is nice, although it also suggests the leveling process is short and that "end game" (Which I keep putting in quotes because if people are in it a matter of hours or even days from launch, it probably ought just to be called "the game".) is going to arrive all too soon.

Levels come so fast I can't keep up. I believe I dinged Level 20 just before I logged out last night. I have a ton of skills and talents and other stuff to upgrade that I've been trying to ignore because to me that's the boring part. Fortunately I noticed right at the end that there's an auto-upgrade option for at least some of it, something I will most definitely be using.

Much more exciting than stats and skills are the mounts and accessories I've been getting. So far I've received three mounts. One, a boarlet, is from the storyline but it's the slowest and I haven't tried it yet. There's a wolf which I think is a pre-registration reward and a bunny that comes from one or other of the many "Events", by which they mostly mean log-in and attendance rewards. I didn't notice which of them it was. I just clicked Claim and it appeared.

The Wolf and the Bunny are identical in speed and they both look great. I'm swapping between them at the moment although the rabbit has the edge due to looking goofier. 

As for cosmetics, so far I've received a bizarre monocle, a much nicer pair of spectacles, some headphones, a full set of street clothes and a leaf for my character to hold in her mouth like some kind of... well, I was going to say yokel but really, who does walk around with a leaf sticking out of their mouth? I'm pretty sure I've never seen anything like it in a game before, so it is at least original.

This, of course, is exactly what I want from a game like this and so far I'm getting it in spades so I'm happy. How long it's going to last is anyone's guess but I'm riding the train until runs into the aforementioned "end game" buffers.  

Or until I get distracted by the next shiny, new toy and wander off, never to return, which seems to be who I am these days. 

Could be worse. 

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. 

Blue Protocol: Star Resonance - Extremely First Impressions

Blue Protocol was never a game I was following - or really paying any attention to at all. I've only ever mentioned it two or three times here on the blog and not at all for a couple of years. 

The most interested in it I ever sounded was at the back end of 2022, when it had been picked up by Amazon Games as the global publisher. At the time, I said I hadn't been planning on playing it, even though I knew there was a lot of hype around the title, but since I had an Amazon Games account already set up, it seemed it might be worth taking a look when it arrived.

It never did arrive, of course. Not through Amazon, anyway. That all fell through for reasons I'm not sure I knew even while it was happening and certainly don't remember now. The game was released in Japan but didn't last long there, closing at the beginning of this year.

And that seemed to be the end of it. Until fairly recently, at least, when I started hearing rumblings about something called Blue Protocol: Star Resonance.  That seemed to be a mobile game at first but then it became apparent there was a PC version or a port or something. Reports on its progress drifted in, here and there, and in that way the name and my recognition of it were kept alive.

I didn't keep a mental note of when it was going to launch. I still had no special plans to play it but I did think maybe I'd take a look when it arrived, if it was on Steam or something and I didn't have to make a new account. Same logic as when Amazon was going to be doing the paperwork, basically.

Then earlier today I saw this news item at MassivelyOP, just as I was wondering what I could find to write about today and I thought there's an idea...

I do enjoy doing First Impressions pieces. They're easy to write and they seem to go down quite well. Usually, I like at least to get through the tutorial before I do one but as I may have mentioned, opportunities to sit down and play three-hour gaming sessions and then spend three more hours turning them into detailed posts are pretty thin on the ground around here just now. 

For example, today I had to drive to the next city over to do some stuff for my aged mother and tomorrow we have a bunch of workmen turning up at the crack of dawn to tear out the old heating system and start putting in a new one, so the first chance I'm likely to get to give the game a decent shake will be Saturday.

But I can download it and make a character. That won't take three hours, will it? OK, I know there have been plenty of times in the past when doing something similar took at least that long but we're past that now, aren't we? 

Nice tee-up for an anecdote about how it took three hours just to download the game and make a character there...

Except the download took about fifteen or twenty minutes and the game installed perfectly and I was able to log straight in and get stuck into making a character right away. Which was fun.

BP:SR is referred to in everything I've read about it as an "anime MMORPG", which could mean a lot of things. In this context, I often feel "Anime" means a look more than anything. I'm not even sure what anime gameplay would be. There as many genres of anime as there are novels or Western games, aren't there? It could be scifi or fantasy or high school drama or historical or... well, anything. 

So that's not much to go on. Visually, though, anime does have a certain look and feel, regardless of the subject matter, and judging purely on Character Creation, which is almost all I've seen of the game so far, this definitely looks like an anime MMORPG.

I really enjoyed making my character even though most of the text was untranslated from the original... Mandarin? 

Sidebar: I'm going to look this up in a moment but I realize all of a sudden that I don't know if this is a Chinese or a Japanese game. I do know the only servers are in China because everyone outside South-East Asia has been complaining about it bitterly and review-bombing the game on Steam for it. On the other hand, every time I saw anything about the original Blue Protocol it always seemed to involve Japan somewhow, right up to the game launching, then closing, there and nowhere else.

On investigation, it seems Blue Protocol itself was Japanese but Blue Protocol: Star Resonance is "developed by Shanghai Bokura Network Technology and published by A Plus Japan". So I guess it's Chinese and Japanese. That's cleared that up, then.

Whatever the language, in Character Creation all the pertinent parts have been translated and the icons
are more than adequate to explain the rest. Well, most of them. I was somewhat at a loss to figure out the meaning of the five symbols that show your character in a variety of poses when you click them but then again that part didn't seem to require any input from the player so it didn't really matter whether I understood them or not.

Character Creation starts with a choice of Body Type and Gender, although the word Gender isn't used and come to think of it I didn't click on the downard-pointing triangle. I just assumed it meant "male". Clearly I need to work on my assumptions some more.

The Body Type is labeled as such but it looks more like an age choice to me, with the options appearing to be Child, Adolescent and Adult. Or I guess they could be Petite, Slim and Well-Built. Depends how you look at it. I went for the middle option, whatever it's supposed to be.

 

From there you get a fairly wide range of Presets and quite a few chances to fine-tune your facial appearance. There are no sliders, other than for color. It's all identikit mixing and matching, which I think I probably prefer to sliders. 

Sliders are far more versatile and you can get much more nuanced results but you can also get sucked into some completely pointless, time-wasting rabbit holes as you try to get exactly the chin density or temple curvature you want, all the time forgetting that no matter how good it looks in Character Creation, you'll never see any of it ever again, once you log into the actual game. It's something of a relief just to pick from a menu and even then I found myself trying to make tiny adjustments that are never going to have any impact on my experience when I start playing the game proper.

I was in character creation for close on half an hour, something I can be reasonably sure of by my Steam played time of 35 minutes. The only other thing I did was watch the very short opening cut scene, then read a short note and put on my starting gear in the room where my character woke up after drowning or whatever it was that happened to her. 

Honestly, I don't know what happened. I wasn't paying attention because Mrs Bhagpuss came in in the middle of the cut scene and asked me a question and I turned round to answer her and neither saw nor heard what happened next, after my character dived down deep into the ocean. When I looked back at the screen, she was in a room somewhere. 

All of that, including what I did when I got to the room, can't have taken much over five minutes, so the rest has to have been making the character. It didn't feel anything like that long, though, which is a strong point in favor of both the tools and the character design.

Oh, and I opened the claim window and got some freebies for pre-registering, which I never did, so I assume everyone gets them. One was a dog you can ride on. looking forward to trying that out. 

Going back to the look of the thing, the character models certainly do scream "anime". There's no doubt about that. I didn't take any of them, but there are plenty of options to have the huge anime-style eyes and the many hair-styles all have that flick-away look that's so familiar. You even get to choose what your teeth look like, which I think may be a first for me.

Hair and eyes are always the two I spend most time on. There are a whole load of pupil choices, which for once actually look reasonable. That took me a while. 

Getting the hair right took longer. You can just take a preset hairstyle but again you can mix and match from "Front", "Back" and "Crown" to get something a little less generic. I was curious about the Crown option. It turns out to be one or two strands of flyaway hair that stick up or out and wave about in the breeze. I toyed with the idea but I suspect it would become quite annoying after the novelty wore off so I settled for the neat and tidy look. 

I have to keep calling her "my character" because one oddity of the process was that at no point did I get a chance to give her a name. I have come across that in other games. It usually means there's some point early on, where naming your character becomes a storyline choice, like when some official asks you to identify yourself or you have to sign some sort of document. We'll see if that happens next time I play.

Which is also when I'll find out if the game has any stickiness I guess. I'm hoping it may be at least as sticky as Crystal of Atlan, which I am theoretically, although not actually, still playing. I did get to about Level 50 or so in that one, which isn't nothing.

The last thing I did before the game dumped me into the opening cut scene was pick a class. There were quite a few to choose from. Maybe ten? I picked the ranged fighter that uses a bow and has a pet that fights for her because I always pick that one. And almost always regret it. The fighter with the giant sword is always more fun. I'll never learn.

All the classes get a difficulty rating. Mine was two stars out of five, so towards the easy end but not the easiest. That was the aforementioned fighter with the big sword. I'm hopeful that the much-maligned auto-combat option will remove any need for skill on my part anyway.  

So far, BP:SR is being torn apart on Steam, with a "Mosly Negative" rating from almost two and a half thousand reviews. I had a quick skim and most of the disses I read seemed to be complaining about things I'm quite keen on, like that auto combat and also auto pathing, or that I don't care about at all, like it being a mobile port, or that I'm expecting not to affect me much, like there being no EU or US servers. 

As for the "boring dialog" and dull quests, I'll make my own mind up on those. It is noticeable that there are a lot of quite sensible, positive reviews, while the negative ones mostly seem to be from people wishing they were playing a different game altogether. I wonder why people bother to download titles they must know they aren't going to enjoy. Seems like a waste of time to me

And speaking of time, that's all I have for this evening, so my first impressions are going to have to end there. For now. There will be more. I guarantee it.