The Tarisland Devs Would Like To Tell You: They're Listening...

This morning I watched a video, brought to my attention by MMOBomb, in which Tencent, developers of upcoming, would-be WoW-beater Tarisland, addressed some of what they see as the key issues brought to their attention by the latest closed beta. As an endearingly unprofessional voice, possibly one of the developers themselves, falteringly read aloud the same words I could see for myself on screen, I found myself wondering whether I'd missed an invite to another round of testing. Or maybe never been chosen to receive one.

I was sufficiently puzzled to go check on the game's official website, where I discovered that the most recent beta had indeed been the one I played back in November. I hadn't missed out on a third opportunity to give the much-anticipated title another once-over. I can now go back to looking forward to doing that later in the year, always assuming they're kind enough to ask me.

It would certainly have been a surprise if there had been another beta since the last one, seeing that test only ended in November. Hardly time to fit in another round, what with Christmas and New Year. What made me think it might have happened were the specific questions the video attempted to answer, most of which address concerns I had no idea anyone had, over systems and mechanics I didn't realise existed. It did seem as though I must have missed a trick, somewhere.

On closer examination, it appears I just didn't happen to come into contact with most of the potential problems because they relate to things I didn't bither with during my not-insignificant time with the game. Some of that is entirely understandable, some less so. 

For example, one section of the video deals with PvP. It's no surprise I wasn't aware that players complained there weren't enough opportunities for players to beat each other up or that there were shortcomings in the matchmaking process. I vaguely knew the game had some form of PvP because there's an annoying pop-up in the never-ending Tutorial that keeps suggesting you go check it out, but I never took the trouble to find out what it was like or even where you went to do it.

Which isn't to say that I wouldn't give it a go if the game was live. I've spent a lot of hours in battlegrounds in theme-parks like World of Warcraft, Rift, EverQuest II and Warhammer Online and mostly had a good time, even though I do think of instanced PvP as the candy of MMORPGs - moreish at first but too much and it makes you feel queasy. In a limited-duration beta, though, I'd have to be very short of better options to spend time running around playing digital laser-tag. It certainly wouldn't have said anything very good about the game if I had.

It's also perhaps not all that odd that I wasn't aware that in beta you could get comparable or even better gear by crafting instead of raiding. If it's unlikely that I'd experiment with PvP in a beta, it's all but impossible to imagine I'd find myself raiding. I don't do raids in live games - why would I want to test them?

I do craft, though, so I suppose I might have found out that way. Only, as Tencent themselves have acknowledged, feedback indicates not all players love to craft: "Some players find Crafting to be too complex and time-consuming", which is why the whole thing is going to be "simplified". You can call it "dumbed down" if you like. They didn't and I don't think I will, either.

I did take a brief look at crafting while I was there but I didn't make much progress. It didn't feel like it was going to be particularly complicated but it did seem as if it might be quite tedious. There weren't that many recipes, so you'd have to keep making the same things and although I was surprised how fast some of  the fireworks I made sold, there didn't seem to be an awful lot to make in the earlier levels that would be either interesting or profitable. 

Getting to the point where I could craft something genuinely exciting, like an Invincible Kitten mount, looked like it would take a lot more effort than I would have been willing to put in so I can't say I'm disappointed to hear the plan now is to make the whole thing quicker and easier. I'm increasingly of the opinion that complex crafting is a better fit for survival games than it is for narrative-driven, theme park MMORPGs, anyway.

The real reason I imagined I might have inadvertently skipped a round of testing came right at the start of the video, when the questions being asked and answered all revolve around things I either didn't remember or never knew were in the game at all. Take the "Inscribed Stone System", the vaguest of details about which are slowly starting to come back to me as I write. 

I recall it being some kind of augmentation you can add to your gear to make it more powerful or give it extra functions and features. Lots of games have something similar and I confess it didn't make much of an impression on me at the time. It seems others were a lot more concerned, particularly by the prospect of being allowed to buy and trade Inscribed Stone Energy, fearing it would lead to some sort of Pay-to-Win scenario. 

Tencent has been running scared of the "P2W" tag since the day Tarisland was announced. There have already been some skirmishes between the developers and the playerbase (Curently defined as people who shout a lot about the game on Reddit and Discord, without necessarily having played in any of the tests.) over what constitutes "Pay To Win". If they work it out, maybe they'll tell the rest of us. 

Regardless of the outcome of those discussions, Tencent is determined not to allow anyone to pin the P2W label on this particular system, so from now on the stuff won't be tradable. Moreover, in order to discourage players from "playing too long", there will be a cap on how much ISE you can get per day. 

Playing too much does seem to be something Chinese game developers worry about, although I'm going to stick my neck out and say they're only really bothered about the home market. I very much doubt they care whether Europeans or Americans spend all day, every day, in front of the screen, especially if it involves them spending more Euros and Dollars. Or maybe that's too cynical. I don't know...

I did at least manage to dredge a few details about the Inscribed Stone System up from the swamps of my memory, when prompted. The other two economic issues featured in the video I don't recall at all. One is Gold Coins, which I'm guessing is the in-game currency. I mean, I knew Tarisland was on the gold standard, like virtually every fantasy rpg ever, but I wasn't aware it had any special significance. 

According to the feedback recap in the video, players felt it was too hard to get gold, meaning when the game goes live there could be a problem with bots and gold sellers or as Tencent prefer to call them "illegal program users". It seems that in attempting to pre-empt this problem by limiting Gold Coins to "more challenging" encounters, Tencent "pushed their guard" a little too far, something they intend to remedy in future by employing "more technical means" of countering those pesky illegal program users and by making Gold Coins easier to get for everyone else.

To which I can only say - good luck with that!

The other potentially game-breaking inclusion in the last beta, at least according to the feedback Tencent received, relates to something called CBT Benefits Cards. I have absolutely no idea what these are or were. I never saw any mention of them and as far as I know I never received any, unless it's jargon for those handouts every game throws at players just for logging in. 

Whatever they were, they were tradeable through the in-game Auction House, which sent people into a tizzy. There was great concern expressed over whether CBT cards would be included in the official launch, when the game goes live. 

Now, I would have thought that was a question that answered itself. What would you you imagine CBT would stand for if not "Closed Beta Test"? Obviously, these cards were specific to the testing process, something the video confirms. Still, just in case it was keeping you up at night, be reassured: no, Closed Beta Test Benefits Cards will not be included in the official launch version of Tarisland!

The last piece of feedback addressed by the video that I want to mention is the reaction to the dungeons in the game and the way they can be accessed. I did do a couple of dungeons, albeit only because there are points in the Main Storyline Quest when you have no choice, and I thought they were pretty good, as these things go but apparently some people - inevitably - complained they were too easy.

Other people kvetched about the time restrictions. Unlike in most Western MMORPGs, you can't just chain-run dungeons in Tarisland until your eyeballs bleed. There's an energy or access mechanic, which the video just refers to as "dungeon attempts" that once again seeks to put a brake on players whose enthusiasm for the game might verge on the self-destructive. 

It seems that the combination of easy basic dungeons and limited attempts per day led players to concentrate on knocking out as many lower-difficulty Arcane Realms as they could, while swerving the more challenging Elite Dungeons. This in turn pissed off the hardcore, who couldn't get groups for the tough stuff. I'd like to say First World Problems but...

Hearing all this in the video, my own selfish concern was that Tencent would respond by making the Arcane Realms harder to appease the concerns of the hardcore. If they did, you could hardly blame them, seeing that would be the demographic most likely to pay the bills. Hearteningly, however, their reponse was much more nuanced, taking into account the requirements of both sides. 

They're going to consider separating the two kinds of dungeons so each uses its own "Dungeon Attempts". They also want to avoid making dungeon-play grindy, instead keeping it focused on being a fun way to level. Instead of making the Arcane Realm harder across the board they're going to give it a Challenge Mode with cosmetic rewards, while leaving the regular version much as it is (Although they do mention making it "more fun", which adds an ominous note to the proceedings...)

There's a fair amount more in the video, which manages to pack a lot into less than ten minutes. There's more about crafting and also an acknowledgement that they may have gone a little overboard in the "exploration" stakes, by which I think they mean PoIs and mini-events, which did indeed come thick and fast in closed beta.

All in all, I found the video largely reassuring, particularly when taken in conjunction with the earlier feedback report published in mid-December. Tate one covered many of the same points and also confirmed there'll be no gender-locking of classes in the final build. I get the feeling Tencent are attempting to rediscover that sweet spot WoW enjoyed around the time of Wrath of the Lich King, when it seemed for a brief while as if the same MMORPG could appeal equally to casual and hardcore players, without short-changing either.

That's a tough one to pull off but I hope they can do it. And even if they can't, good on them for trying.

It Comes With The Territory : Housing In Once Human

It looks like I'll be playing Once Human quite seriously as soon as it reaches a non-wipe release of some kind so I'm following through on my plan to cut back on the time I'm spending in beta. I have to say I'm not finding it easy. There's no game I'd rather be playing right now.

Still, short term pain, long term gain, right? And I haven't withdrawn from the beta entirely. I'm just trying to limit myself to no more than one, shortish session a day. An hour or so. That's not too much, is it? 

I'm also going to pull back on the long, detailed posts about it, I think. Got to keep something in the locker for when the game goes Live. I don't imagine finding new things to say about it is likely to be a problem when that happens, anyway. It won't be exactly the same game by then.

I'm betting it won't be radically different, either, though. As I mentioned, it's a very traditional beta. The game feels feature-complete so I'm not seeing any of the weird lurches and yaws in direction that come with playing games in an alpha state. Everything that was in place when I started a few weeks ago a is still there now. It just works better.

What I 'm mostly seeing are lots of small, incremental changes, designed to fine-tune the experience to make it more satisfying, less frustrating and broadly more fun for players. The latest patch notes offer some good examples of the kind of thing I mean. 

This is the guy that gives Commissions. I'm guessing the new tutorial sends you to see him but I found him on my own because I talk to everyone, just in case.

For example, they added a tutorial mission that appears the first time you reach Deadsville, designed to introduce the Commission system, a fairly important mechanic that feeds you your Daily Tasks. I did manage to find that on my own but it certainly wasn't obvious, so that's a thoughtful addition. 

(Also, very observant readers with highly retentive memories may note that I've been getting the name of the starting town wrong all this time. I've been calling it Deadville, when it's actually Deadsville, with an "s" in the middle. It makes me want to pop my fingers and yell "Daddio! every time I read it now I've noticed.)

The latest update also makes the first two bosses easier, a change that makes me feel quite cheerful about the direction the devs want to take the game. I've been in plenty of betas where that patch note would have explained how we'd all have more fun if the bosses took longer to kill, something that, in my experience, would not prove to be true. I'd far rather they erred on the side of leniency than the other way around.

Perhaps the most welcome note is the one about changes to where you can build. The patch adds to the areas in which you can build your house or Hive (I'll explain later.) and also allows you to settle down closer to existing NPC Settlements. One of the more frustrating aspects of the game for me has been the frequent messaging telling me why I can't put my territory marker down where I wanted to build my house. Too near a Settlement; too near a Stronghold; too near a Road...

Wouldn't want to be living there when the rains come...

Any relaxation of the zoning restrictions has to be a good thing. I realise urban blight is one of the biggest problems any MMORPG that allows free-build, open-world housing has to address but there needs to be enough give in the system to allow people to live somewhere convenient, not just way out in the boonies. Then again, you can build in shallow water, which seems to suggest a somewhat too relaxed attitude to health and safety, not least with all those mutant alligators roaming about in there...

While we're on the topic, I was going to do a whole post on housing and building in the game. I consider it to be one of the better implementations I've seen. Since I'm probably never going to get around to that, maybe I'll just go over a few of the salient parts now. 

The mechanics are introduced early on and feel relatively simple, as these things go. You find a spot where building is permitted, set down your Terminal and start building. The controls are easy to understand and to use. They're well-documented and they work. I've done a good deal of building and not hit any glitches or bugs. The snap placement can be a bit fiddly, but then when isn't it?

Everything is prefabricated, something I hugely prefer to the more simulationist approach some games adopt. I really don't want to be making my own bricks. So long as you have the correct raw materials on hand, all you need to do is open the interface, find the structure or object you want, select it and place it where it needs to go. 

There are also wallpaper and flooring designs that can be added at a click, Available options for infrastructure, fixtures, fittings and furniture are tied to your progress through the storyline, in that you open each new stage by killing a storyline Boss. That gets you the basics. You then spend points to open specific lines like lighting or roofing in whatever order you prefer. It's very simple and works well as an incentive to progress, although I don't personally approve of linking combat and crafting progression. I'd prefer to see them kept separate.

One thing I do very much like is that recipes outside of the basic and advanced lines can be found as drops, both from containers in Strongholds and from mobs. I find it quite exciting to open a storage crate and find a blueprint for a sofa inside. Most of my better furniture has come to me that way.

The amount of space you get for your house is fairly generous. Enough for a good-sized building and a decent garden or yard. You can expand it considerably by way of the Hive system, something that is very poorly explained, possibly because using it that way isn't exactly what the developers had in mind.

"Hives" are what Once Human has instead of Guilds. The concept is introduced via a tutorial mission (Well, a Journey section, much the same thing.) that invites you to join a Hive. Since I'm not much of a one for guilds these days, my first instinct when something like this crops up - as it almost always does in any new MMORPG I try - is to check if it's possible to meet the mission requirements by making a one-person guild of my own.

In Once Human I'm happy to say that is something you can do. Making a Hive costs nothing and you only need one player to do it. It's a very simple process. The confusing part is what you do with your Hive once you have it. 

Hives, like individual players, are entitled to claim land and build on it. The Journey/Mission asks you to place the Hive marker to establish a Territory for your Hive but it doesn't really explain how to go about it. I spent a while trying to figure it out until eventually I ran across something online that suggested you could use your Hive Territory Terminal to extend the boundaries of your personal Territory, just by putting it down inside the limits. That was how I came to move house.

Great view of the sunrise. Shame the boundary line cuts right into the corner bedroom, though. It's going to be fresh in there come winter, with no wall.

Taking a step back to what I said about the zoning restrictions, when I first came to look for somewhere to live, I had quite some difficulty finding a suitable spot. I was a few days late getting into beta and all the obvious locations had already been taken. I spent quite a while searching for anywhere that would let me put my Terminal down and when I found a place, I didn't consider the potential for future development very carefully.

I was pretty lucky. It was a good spot with enough room for my new home and a fine view over the valley. What wasn't so good was the way the boundary lapped up against a road on one side, a cliff on another and a sheer drop on a third. When it came time to extend the limits with the Hive Terminal, there just wasn't enough room. The Terminal just couldn't be placed anywhere on my Territory.

(At this juncture I probably ought to mention you don't have to put the two Territories together. Even with a one-person Hive, you can have both a personal Territory and a Hive Territory, in different parts of the map. That would give you two personal teleport spots and presumably the option to build two complete properties. I haven't yet tested how that works and I probably won't get around to it in this beta but it's something to keep in mind.)

That's how I came to test one of Once Human's most impressive building features: relocation. I've seen this offered in other games. Vanguard had a very limited version of it, I seem to recall, and Landmark, typically, had an extremely awkward, over-complicated system for it that didn't work very well but this is the first I've seen that just works, first time, right out of the box.  

My new place, as seen from the road.

I was very nervous about trying it out. I expected it would either be frustratingly fiddly or it just wouldn't work at all. I thought there was a small chance I'd lose all my stuff but a much bigger chance I'd keep the mats but have to rebuild from scratch. Still, what else are betas for? So I gave it a go.

Literally the only problem I had was the same one as before - finding a good spot no-one else had already claimed. I ran around for a good while, carrying my Terminal with the Relocation screen open. That showed me all the boundaries of everyone else's Territories. Of course, every time I tried to put mine down in a space someone hadn't taken, the game came up with some reason why I couldn't do it. It was annoying.

After about twenty minutes running around, I finally got an OK from the planning department for a nice-looking spot down by the coast. This time I took the trouble to check the area before staking my claim. It seemed like it ought to be big enough so I put my Terminal down and Relocated, expecting the worst. 

But it just worked! Perfectly. The ghost of my house appeared on my cursor. I rotated and adjusted it until it was where I wanted it, then I put it down and it took on solid form, intact and complete. Nothing was glitched, nothing got lost, nothing was messed up in any way. All my furniture was even still inside, set up exactly as it had been.

I managed to relocate to a spot where the boundary also cuts into the same corner! Still can't put a wall there. But just look at that view!

Okay, there was one room with some rocks poking through a wall but they looked pretty good so I'm calling it a feature. It was by far the best implementation of this kind of operation I've ever used. It makes moving house from one area to another as you level up seem like a bona fide option for once. No packing up your stuff, finding a new home, then putting it all into place again. Just pick up the whole house and everything inside it in one go then put it back down!

With that done, I was easily able to add the Hive Terminal to push the boundaries of my new Territory out further. Now I have a good-sized chunk of land, sufficient for a big patio, an area for my heavy machinery, a separate space for my garage (I have a motorbike now!) and enough land for a small market garden, should I wish to take up farming.

The Hive Terminal supercedes the Personal one so all I need to do is keep that supplied with wood, gravel and ore. There is a maintenance requirement on both kinds of Territory but it's entirely automated and extremely cheap. You could easily gather enough mats in a few minutes to keep your home at full maintenance for weeks. 

Oh look. It seems as though I have written that post about housing after all. Go me!

I was going to say something about fishing and a few other things but I guess I'l save those for another time. Beta still has a couple of weeks to run and, while I'm playing less, I'm not going to stop altogether. There'll be time for another post or two before we're done, I'm sure.

Once Human: Mid-Beta Review

Good morning and a Happy New Year to all. As Mrs Bhagpuss said ironically, as I wished her the tidings of the season, "and doesn't it feel different?" 

I guess not but we can hope. From my perspective, it's potentially the year I stop working, something that's been an ambition of mine since I left school. As a child, when adults used to ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I had two two stock answers. One was "write poetry". The other was "nothing".

I lost interest in the first by the time I went to college but the second remained a lifelong goal and finally it seems like it might be within reach. That said, I also quite like money and working two days a week at a job I mostly enjoy isn't exactly going down the pit, so I'm leaving my options open for now.

Anyway, we didn't come here to review my retirement plan. What did we come here for? 

Oh yes. I imagine it was for a post on Once Human. It usually is, these days. Why don't we have one of those?

(See? I told you this year wasn't going to be any different.)

Since it is the start of a new year, though, perhaps I should attempt to review my findings about the game so far. I downloaded the beta client on the thirteenth of December so I've had about two and a half weeks to come to some kind of preliminary conclusion. That ought to be long enough.

The short version is - it's pretty good. A more-than-solid, entertaining, fun game with lots of content, engaging gameplay and plenty of variety. I think that should have come across in the posts I've written so far. 

Let's expand on that with a few bullet points. I do like bullet points. They're snappy!

• Good shape for beta. For a closed beta, I'd say very good shape. The client runs almost faultlessly, at least for me. I haven't had a single crash and only a couple of momentary stutters in the whole time I've been playing. Lag is minimal to non-existent even with a poor ping to the West Coast. A very smooth experience all round.
  

• Serious about testing. There's been a patch, with proper, detailed patch notes, every couple of days. Bugs are being found and fixed right in front of our eyes.

• Interested in feedback. There are several ways to send feedback, including the now-obligatory Discord channel. NetEase have been running active promotions on social media. There's a very detailed in-game survey you can complete, repeatedly, allowing you to report your changing opinions as you learn more about the game. I've done that several times. 

• In sum, a real beta. It seems like a feature-complete build that they're tuning for release, not some half-baked experiment they're running. Obviously, the beta doubles as a marketing excercise but the focus is clearly on improving the final product before release.

• 
  Lots to do. There's a broader range of gameplay options than I've seen in a new game for quite a while. After two weeks of playing every day, I still haven't even figured out what all my choices are, far less gotten to grips with most of them. I'm finding new sytems and mechanics just about every time I play.

• A content-rich environment. The world is huge. I'm still in the first region, Dayton Wetlands, which is tuned for new players up to about level 15 and I doubt I've seen even half of that. There seems to be far more leveling content than one character would possibly need, making alts seem an attractive option, for once. That said, I'm not sure alts are even available. I can't find any way to make a second character short of making another account. That's something I need to investigate further.
  

• PvE or PvP supported and separated. Nice to see servers offering both rulesets available from the get-go. Usually we have to get several months into Live before complaints from whichever faction got ignored force the devs to cave and add a half-baked version of the playstyle they hoped to avoid. On the other hand...
  
  
  
  

• PvE or PvP? Did I miss a memo? Everything I read says it's a choice you make at character creation and once you make your pick, you have to stick with it. Except I have no memory of being offered the option. Maybe I just missed it but since I can't figure out how to make a second character, I can't go back and check. My current Server Select screen shows no ruleset indicators, which I guess would make sense if it's an irreversible decision. It's not like I coud swap now. I must be on a PvE cluster... I think. At tleast, no-one's tried to gank me yet.

• Gameplay loops are satisfying. Note the plural. You can adventure, compete or create. There's a full dance card for all three. I shouldn't really comment on the competitive aspect since I haven't engaged in any of the territorial PvP, which takes place on offshore islands. Leveling, collecting, building and exploring, though, I have tried and they're are all quite compelling.

• Building is a strong feature. I've played a lot of games with construction elements and most of them are fun but this is better than average. I want to do a full post on it but suffice to say I'm finding the tools reliable and comfortable to use, the creative options inviting and the mechanics robust. There's plenty of room for improvement but for a beta it's an appropriately solid foundation.
  
  
  

• Combat is satisfying. It feels natural, intuitive and impactful. It's also kinetic, with movement playing a great part in the success of any fight. Unless you just snipe from range, of course. That works, too. Mob AI is varied and interesting. Fights can be surprising and exciting, especially when somethng grabs you and starts to wrestle or lets loose with a disorienting, psychedelic light show. Again, there's plenty of room for improvement - I could certainly do with less focus on ammo for a start - but I have no major complaints.

• Story is better than expected. I've been a bit surprised by how intriguing I'm finding it, to be honest. The narrative is more subtle than I'm used to in most imports. Definitely more New World or The Secret World than Dawnlands or Tarisland. Storytelling is varied, too. There are lengthy and engaging side-stories and there's a lot of diagetic narrative in the form of diaries, letters, journals and notes, found lying around in abandoned homes and offices. If you don't care for that sort of thing, though, there's also a central mission sequence that's much more directive. Lean into the story or stick to the basic plot. It's up to you.

• World-building is even better. Everything you see and hear supports the spoken and written narrative. It's consistent and consistently impressive. The Starfall Event gave birth to a very unnerving and peculiar environment with some strongly surreal elements. The conceit of another reality attempting to assert its dominance over the one we're familiar with is effectively conveyed, making Once Human feel notably different from what I originally thought would be its most obvious point of reference, TSW. I think it helps if you relish not fully understanding what's going on, as I do, though. It looks like it might be a while before we find out the full truth. If ever.
  

• 
  Immersive Environments. I think this needs to be highlighted, separately from any general praise for the world-building in the game as a whole. There are a lot of abandoned settlements and structures scattered all over the region I've explored and even though they use many of the same assets, they all feel different and individual. Better yet, they feel logical, like places that grew through use. They seem to tell a story just by the way they're laid out. That's by no means the case in every game and it does make quite a difference.
  

• Graphics are good, sound is great. The visuals probably aren't going to win a lot of awards. They're attractive but not jaw-dropping. The soundscape, however, is really top-notch. It's one of those games where you find yourself spinning around to see what's creeping up behind you, then finding you've guessed correctly, based entirely on what you heard. Lightning storms, which occur very frequently, are espcially nerve-wracking. I haven't yet played with headphones on yet and I'm slightly apprehensive about starting. I think it might all be a bit too immersive, especially with the lights out.

• Tuned for fun. That's how I'd generally describe the whole game. Not an awful lot gets in the way of your enjoyment as you're playing. At the same time, nothing feels overly simplistic. Systems and mechanics are largely clear and work smoothly but you still have to think and make choices. The game by no means plays itself. It can take a good while to get from one place to another but there's always so much to see and do on the way it feels like time well-spent. There are fast travel options but they don't diminish the scale of the world, which is significant. The whole thing just feels well-judged.

• 
   Overall, a very impressive achievement. I think we all know how hard it is to make a game like this to a standard that will find general acceptance, let alone be met with enthusiasm. Gamers frequently have highly unrealistic expectations and developers, equally frequently, have equally unrealistic ambitions. The two coming together can be a car crash. I doubt Once Human is going to be winning any Game of the Year awards but if the general reaction seems to be "It's better than I expected. Not bad, actually...", in gamer-speak that's almost a ringing endorsement.
  

As far as I can tell, the beta has about another three weeks to run, although I've yet to find an official date. I'm torn between carrying on as I have been, spending almost all my gaming time there and making the most of my access while it lasts, or quitting while I'm ahead to avoid bitter disappointment, when the mean devs take my new toy away. 

What I should probably do is wean myself off the beta gradually, reducing my play-time slowly as I simultaneously re-introduce other, much-neglected games to the mix. That way, by the time the servers shut down, I'll barely notice. I suspect I won't be that sensible, though. 

Finally, to sum up, I kept a couple of bullet points for the end.

• It's addictive. Like Valheim and Dawnlands before it, I could happily plow a couple of hundred hours into this one without even blinking.

Unlike those games, though

• It's an MMORPG. And we all know what that means. When this thing goes live you might never hear from me again...

Well, if I didn't have a blog that is...

One Down, How Many To Go?

It's been a whole week since the last time I wrote anything substantive about Once Human, not counting that Christmas Day squib about the santa hat. Rest assured, I have been playing every day. I just thought we probably all needed a break from the apocalypse over the holdays.

Yesterday I put in one of my longest sessions yet, almost four hours straight. I don't often play any game for that long without a break these days but survival games in general do lend themselves to rambling, extended sessions and this one makes those more immersive than most.

It does to me, anyway. When it comes to gaming, particularly the persistent, open-world RPG kind, I have a preference I don't think I've mentioned before, one that I'm not sure is necessarily apparent from the games I choose to play and write about.

I have said, many times, that I prefer, whenever possible, not to play human characters. I'd rather play animals, animal-human hybrids or, failing that, humanoids of dimunitive stature like gnomes or fairies. If I do have to play a human character, though, my favorite setting to play them in, by far  is contemporary or near-future. 

I find it much easier to connect with a human character who's able to wear clothes that look like clothes I recognize, not like medieval armor, which really doesn't figure in any vision of myself I've ever had. I also much prefer humans to wield weapons that look familiar, like guns or baseball bats or monkey-wrenches, not fifteen-foot long girders with lasers shooting out of the end.

I also have a penchant for modern buildings that have fallen into disrepair or ruin, something I very much enjoy exploring in real life, should I ever get the chance. It's evocative and fascinating to be able to wander through the decaying detritus of a dead or dying commercial sector or prowl around the dusty, tumbled furniture in a deserted suburban home. 

These kinds of environments tend to elicit more complex emotional reactions from me than the gosh-wow awe and amazement that comes from graphic artists' joyful renderings of royal palaces and stately homes. Not that those aren't fun, in their own way, but they don't resonate the way a beat-up filling station does.

Obviously, I like the pretty stuff, too, but given the choice I'd generally go for gritty, urban realism and sylised streetwear over fairytale fantasy and frou-frou frocks, every time. The Secret World is a long way from being my favorite MMORPG in terms of gameplay but it's been my benchmark for playing dress-up for over a decade and it comes in close to the top for set design, too. 

It's too early to say whether Once Human can topple TSW from either of those positions but it's got to be in with a chance. While I don't see any sign yet that it's going to compete with Funcom's game for leather-jacketed street cool, the depth of detail in both architecture and interior design look increasingly impressive the further I explore.

Which is not to say there's anything particularly ground-breaking or exceptional here. It's much more likely I just don't get to play many games with these kinds of settings. I mostly play MMORPGs, which as we know, are mostly fantasy or sci-fi. I'm fairly sure I'd have been equally as impressed, or more so, by any number of well-known titles, if only I'd played them, but since nothing I've noticed between TSW and this also came with a New Weird overlay, my points of comparison are necessarily limited.

That's a very round-about, long-winded way of saying I often find myself spending longer playing Once Human than I mean to because I take so much time gawping at overturned vending machines or staring at broken billboards as though they were exhibits in a gallery. I'd rarely stop and gaze at a sumptuous ballroom in a fantasy game the way I stare in delight at a run-down, out-of-town shopping mall.

Even so, my capacity for taking screenshots of urban decline, considerable though it is, has its limits. I wouldn't be spending this long going through every trash-filled room in every run-down building if it wasn't for the hook the game sets every time you enter a new location.

As soon as you cross the threshold of a named settlement, be it a farm or a factory or a mall, a set of objectives appears on screen. These are similar but not identical for each place you visit. Usually you have to kill a certain number of the inhabitants, find a "mysterious" but unspecified object, loot a couple of gear or weapons containers and maybe kill an Elite mob. 

It's astonishing how effective a motivator this can be. It turns every delapidated show house or deviant-infested repair shop into a hidden object puzzle. Not that the objects are hard to find per se. They light up or glow or stand out from the background, bordered in white. To be absolutely certain, you can press Q, sending out a pulse of energy that illuminates anything you may have missed. 

A recent patch added extra glow to chests to make them even easier to see. And if that wasn't enough, best of all, the game uses a very effective graphical trick to make life easier, one I haven't encountered before. When you enter a building, the ambient light alters automatically, effectively emulating the real-world experience of your eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom. It's very effective and immersive, too.

All things considered, I get the strong impression the developers focused closely on encouraging players to feel good about exploring the environment, fitting the gameplay around the experience rather than the other way around. It's not so much that it feels natural - theres' nothing natural about braining a zombie with a monkey-wrench - as that it feels bizarrely comfortable. Very little is awkward or frustrating and yet it doesn't feel insultingly easy, either. 

I realise as I write this that I'm describing the whole experience very much from the viewpoint of the Explorer archetype we're all familiar with. This really is an explorer's world. It's thrilling to explore for the sheer fun of it. At the same time, all those numbered, tabulated tasks speak directly to the Achiever, the archetype which usually comes second for me in any of those Bartle tests I've done. It's no wonder I've been finding it so compulsive.

One thing I've been less happy about is the way the game follows what seems to have become the standard model for crafting progression in these kinds of Survival games, where each tier is locked behind a boss kill. I first encountered it in Valheim, where I didn't really like it much, then I saw it replicated verbatim in Dawnlands, where I liked it even less. 

Now, here it is again and I'm still not keen. It's not a pleasure, just an annoying necessity. Granted, a successful boss kill does release a momentary burst of endorphins but I'd happily forego the hit for a more straightforward, skill-based progression system, one bearing a more meaningful relationship to the crafting process itself. Mixing crafting and combat this way always seems counter-intuitive to me.

Still, if you're going to do it, at least make it manageable for players who prefer to craft rather than kill and therefore may not have the skills to handle challenging boss fights. That ought to be the rule. Again, it's too early to say whether Once Human achieves that standard - or even aims for it - but I can say that I have now killed the first boss and it went well.

The tool-tip suggests two level ten players for the fight so since I was going solo I tried to over-level for it. By the time I dinged 14, though, it had become apparent to me that, while you can keep on leveling up as long as you want, extra levels don't bring the same kind of innate, material advantages in this situation as they might in other games. What I really needed were better weapons but short of some exceptional luck with a Weapons Crate, I also needed the next tier of crafting to make them. Something of a Catch 22. 

I watched a couple of YouTube videos of the fight and it didn't look difficult. Long and tedious, yes, but the tactics seemed easy to understand and not much harder to execute. My biggest concern was finding a time when Beryl wasn't likely to interrupt me mid-fight. In the end, yesterday afternoon, with Beryl sleeping in the armchair behind me, I just got fed up of waiting, made myself a thousand rounds of ammunition, repaired all my gear, ate, drank and restored my sanity and then teleported to the location and went in.

It was, as promised, a fairly straightforward fight. It followed what I'd seen in the videos quite closely although as with all these fights, there are always small variations. Still, there were no real surprises. I was concentrating so hard I didn't even think of taking any screenshots so the only record I have is the handy Victory screen the game pops up for you as you exit the instance.

The fight seemed to take a long time but that was mostly because the weapons I had, a couple of handguns, did relatively little damage. The boss, the Foul Shadowhunter, recently renamed from the perfectly acceptable Ravenous Hunter for reasons that escape me, has a massive health pool but it dosn't matter because you mostly can't shoot him anyway. He's immune from attack for much of the fight. Instead, you have to shoot his gigantic gatling gun, which has its own much smaller health pool. 

When you deplete that to zero he drops the gun and just stands there like a lemon. You pick the gun up and empty the entire magazine into him. If you do it correctly, aiming for the head, it takes huge chunks off his health. When the ammo runs out, the dance begins again. There are a couple of other phases, where you have to run around destroying things to stop adds spawning but most of the fight consists of hiding behind barrels while the boss shoots uselessly at them, then popping out while he takes a breather to blast his gun until he drops it.

I got him down with three goes on his big gun, which seemed pretty decent from what I'd seen in the videos on YouTube, where everyone clearly had far better weapons than I did. I didn't time it but it felt like eight or nine minutes. 

Longer than I'd have liked, sure, but not even close to being either as long, boring or annoying as virtually any instanced boss fight I'd done in a decade of Guild Wars 2's Living Story. I'd say it was about on a par with the first bosses in both Valheim and Dawnlands If things carry on like that way, it should be manageable enough. I wouldn't say I'm looking forward to the next boss fight but at least I'm not dreading it.

That, though, can wait for a good while. First I have a whole new tier of crafting to explore, something that will also require me to level up a few times to earn the requisite points to open all the options and learn all the blueprints. Beating the first boss also unlocks the Cradle, the device in your backpack where you store the Deviations you have to collect to give you extra abilities and buffs. 

All that, though, is for another post. There's so much to talk about! I haven't even mentioned my new Gacha machine. It plays Whack-a-Mole and spits out blueprints. I'd tell you more but I don't understand how it works yet.

I guess I'll have to save that for next time.

Nothing Says "I Survived The Apocalypse " Like A Limp Santa Hat

Here's a thing I'd really like to know: just how long is this Once Human beta going to last? As of last night there's a Christmas event, an in-game scavenger hunt with real-world prizes you can win in a contest on Discord, which is where you can also find a code to claim a santa hat for your character. Plus another ten thousand invites are going out to new testers, none of which seems like something that would happen if the beta was about to end in a few days.

I only ask because I'm falling into that troublesome pattern of playing beta like it was live. It's a perennial problem. I guess a lot of people experience something like it When a beta's every bit as good, if not quite a bit better, than most Live games, why not play it as if it was here to stay?

It's an existential conundrum, anyway. All games go away, don't they? Does it matter if it happens next week, next year, next decade? Or, as seems ever more worryingly possible, next century. If even then.

Are beta characters less valid just because they're ephemeral? How long is long enough to matter? What makes a character in a video game valid, anyway? Is it all down to how long they keep on not existing? And doesn't intensity or originality count for something? Is fun in the moment an insufficient return for effort expended? Does value only multiply by time spent? 

You can drive yourself crazy thinking about stuff like that. Unless you have a metaphysics paper to write I'd recommend not going there. Still, I'd like to know, all the same.

Until I find out, I guess I'll just go on enjoying myself. I've certainly been doing that.

Other than forty-five minutes in that Reign of Guilds beta, which I only racked up "for science", I haven't played any other games since I got invited to test Once Human. The knowledge that I'm going to have to do it all over again, when the game launches, is the only thing that's keeping me from playing two or three times as much as I have been. Even when I resist, I can't motivate myself to play another game instead. I just don't play anything.

It's not that Once Human is that good. I mean , it is good, sure. It's very good but it's no coincidence that most of the games I've devoted huge chunks of time to over the last few yeas have been some flavor of Survival. I'm clearly as vulnerable today to the hooks employed by that genre as I once was to the Diku-MUD inspired tricks of the Classic MMORPG era. 

Is that a good thing? Probably not. At least I have a blog now, so I can write about my obsession and in that way convince myself it serves some greater purpose. Without that, I really would have some questions I couldn't answer.

I did spot something today that might conceivably pry me away from OH for a while. Naturally, it's another survival title, albeit one that's out of beta, although I wouldn't like to put money on how long it'll be hanging around.

I'm talking about Dawnlands, of course, and it just got a new update. I was in Steam, spending some of my Christmas Present money on games in the Winter Sale, when I noticed it was pending. I checked the notes and it seems they've added a whole new biome, which is a big deal for a game of this kind. The image in the patch notes looks gorgeous, too. I ought to find time to go check that out, at least.

As for the sale games I bought, I restricted myself to a couple of Point & Click adventures. I can all but guarantee I'll play them fairly soon. I've been itching for a good point & click fior a while, now. 

There were several on my wishlist; all discounted, naturally. Is anything not in the sale? I picked Crown and Pawns and Tales Noir Preludes as the best combination of Bargain and Will Definitely Play, two tags Steam really ought to add. 

I had Cats and the Other Lives in my basket but I took it out at the last minute on the grounds I'd never find time for three P&Cs. It's at a steep discount, though, so it's odds on I'll crack and grab it before the sale ends.

Anyway, those are my excuses for being on Steam on Christmas Day and for blogging about it afterwards. What excuse I'm going to give for playing Once Human after I post this I'm not so sure.

 I'm sure I'll come up with something...

Crisis? What Crisis?

A couple of days ago, I logged into Once Human and opened the map to see if I could teleport from my house to Deadville. I was out of food, a very common occurence, and I was wondering whether any of the vendors there sold anything I could eat.

Next time I complete one of those surveys and get to the part where they ask whether there's anything I don't like abut the game and if I have any suggestions on how it could be improved, I must remember say something about the Survival mechanics; specifically, eating and drinking. 

I'm generally fine with survival gameplay. I don't mind having to eat and drink and sleep and make sure I have ammunition and all the other background, housekeeping tasks that serve to make a gameworld feel a little less artificial, a little more organic. The key word in that last sentence, though, is "background".

So long as it's a minor element, something that adds texture but doesn't get in my way, then I'm broadly in favor. When finding something to eat and drink starts to become the focus of every play session, though, I'd say the dial's drifted too far towards simulation and too far from fun.

That said, the survival mechanics in Once Human aren't even all that consistent or convincing. You get hungry and thirsty much faster than I would consider realistic and yet you never seem to get cold, even when you're running around in your underwear. You can stand out in the rain as long as you like without seeming to get wet. There's not even any requirement to put a roof over your crafting stations, as there is in  both Valheim and Dawnlands. You can whip up a batch of roasted hawthorn berries on your stove, outside on the patio, in a raging thunderstorm. I know. I did it last night.

Fine night for a cook-out.

I was reduced to dry-roasting berries to eat because I've been finding it extremely challenging to keep myself fed. I've managed to solve my hydration problems by building a raincatcher next to my front door, along with a water barrel to hold the overflow, but my attempts to dry and cure all the meat from the many deer I've slaughtered have so far been unsuccessful, due to a severe lack of salt.

Salt, apparently, comes from the sea. You heat the sea-water on the stove and once the liquid boils away you're left with a salty residue. Sounds simple, only I don't know where the ocean is. I seem to be right in the middle of a swamp and the water there, foul as it may be, remains resolutely fresh, at least in the context of salinity.

Even if I did have some salt, I still wouldn't be able to cure my meat. I know that much because I had a little salt once. I have no idea how I got it. It was just there in my pack. I don't remember picking it up but I guess I must have. 

I put the salt and the meat in the drier but I couldn't get it to dry the meat. Then I lost the salt somehow, fiddling around, trying to make something happen. Now I just have raw meat.

You can eat your meat raw if you want. You can eat raw berries too. I've been doing both but it sends you crazy. 

Being crazy, as I discussed in another post, isn't that bad but it's generally not ideal and beyond a certain point it does become problematic. Still, it's easy to get sane again - a good nap will do it every time - or, if you're far from your bed, just pop a handful of sanity gummies. Best of all, a nice bottle of beer will have you thinking straight in a moment.

The only game I've played where I'm positively happy to see it start raining.

(It's endearing, isn't it, that someone would think drinking beer was the high road to good mental health. I laughed a lot when I read that tool-tip.)

The real problem, though, the single survival mechanic I would pick out as one that has to go before this game goes live, is the insanely fast rate at which good food spoils. Both raw ingredients and cooked food, or at least the few examples I've been able to get my hands on so far, go from fresh to spoiled in just twenty-four hours. That is ridiculous.

It means you pretty much have to find and eat the food as you need it. Every single day, when I log back in, any food I had from the day before has gone off. Strictly speaking you can still eat it spoiled food and I have, when it was that or starve, but just a couple of pieces give you gut-ache and more than that pretty much finishes you off for anything more than lying in bed, groaning.

Just give me the snacks!

Fortunately, canned and bottled food doesn't spoil. I've had access to some of that from login rewards and, I think, as loot from storage chests. Unfortunately, the rate at which you become hungry and thirsty is also overtuned, so I go through tinned Spam like an unsupervised toddler with a packet of Haribo.

All things considered, eating and drinking is a royal pain, at least at low level. I'm hoping it gets better as you level up. That's how it works in most games. 

Leveling in OH is a lot slower than I'm used to in modern games, though. It's a design choice of which, once again, I'm broadly supportive but it does mean that the subsistence lifestyle seems to go on forever.

I'm hoping all of this will get tuned in future updates to be less frustrating and more entertaining. I can only assume the feedback they're getting will be pretty negative, where some of the harsher survival mechanics are concerned, unless I'm completely out of tune with contemporary tolerance for this kind of fiddle-faddle. Maybe survival specialists demand this level of micro-management but I bet no-one else does and I think NetEase are going for as mass-market an audience as they can get, so I feel reasonably confident it won't be this way forever.

Anyway, getting back to the point of the post, which I realise I haven't even gotten around to mentioning yet...

While I had the map open I noticed a big, red icon I hadn't seen before. I clicked on it for information and it opened a tool-tip that told me there was some kind of public event happening at the indicated location. It was enticingly entitled something along the lines of "The Return of Disco", which immediately made me want to go see what what was happening. There was an option to click on the icon and teleport directly to where the action was. So I did.

I had no idea what to expect but luckily, when I arrived, some instructions appeared in the Mission tracker at the top of the screen. Unfortunately, I don't speak Chinese so I couldn't read them. There are still elements of the game that have yet to be translated and this turned out to be one of them.

It's Studio 54 all over again.

There were a couple of things I could understand: a counter that currently stood at 0/40 and a timer that had just under half an hour to run. I knew how long I had and how much I needed to do in the time. I just didn't know what that was.

Accepted strategy at this point would usually be to watch everyone else and try to copy them. Only there wasn't anyone. I was the only one there. I was in a sprawling complex of quonset huts, portakabins and bizarre, makeshift wooden towers with various zombies, Deviants and floating monstrosities milling about all over the place. Right in the center, beneath a huge mirror-ball, stood the thirty-foot tall, ghostly figure of the same boss I'd fought in the tutorial.

With no better idea in mind, I tried attacking the ghost but predictably my bullets went straight through him so I gave up on that and started investigating. Ok, looting. I spent a very enjoyable twenty-five minutes or so, as the timer inexorably ticked away, exploring every building, climbing all the towers, killing all the creatures and taking everything that wasn't nailed down. It was hella fun.

In all that time I never saw another player but somehow the item count for the event went from 0/40 to 2/40 so I guess I did the thing I was meant to be doing at least twice. I still have no idea what it was.

If I could figure out how to drop that disco ball on his head we might get somewhere...

Then, five minutes before the end, two players showed up. They clearly had a plan. They zipped around all over the place and the counter began to tick over. I'd have helped if I could have figured out what they were doing but I was still none the wiser so I concentrated on keeping the Deviants busy.

As the count increased I noticed the ghostly figure beginning to fill out and take on material form. I figured whatever we were up to was meant to bring the creature to a sufficiently physical state so we could take it on and that turned out to be the case. The only problem was, by the time we could hit the thing, there wasn't much more than a minute left on the clock.

The three of us gave it everything we had. The towering monstrosity soaked up our fire and occasionally let loose with a powerful AE attack that sent a wave of energy rippling out around in all directions. I failed to get out of the way of one of those and it took me to about ten per cent health so it was just as well it didn't happen too often.

I was using my pistol, for which I had plenty of ammunition for a change, having found a stash in one of the storage crates, but I also picked up a few oil barrels and lobbed them for good measure. They explode on impact and do considerable damage. 

I was too busy fighting to take a picture of the boss so here's one of a creepy cult den I found while I was looting exploring instead.

Like many games, Once Human lets you pick up objects from the environment and use them as weapons but unlike most such games I've played, it's actually worth the bother. At these levels, some of the ad hoc options do better damage than my own arsenal and they don't need to be crafted, repaired or reloaded, either.

The seconds ticked down. It looked like we might make it. The boss was big but he didn't have a ridiculous health pool. Continuous fire from three handguns was more than enough to finish him.

Or it would have been, if we'd had another five seconds. When the timer hit zero the boss was on less than 2% health but that was all he needed for the win. I was optimistic there might be some kind of consolation prize for paricipating but no, it seems the test was Pass/Fail. At zero on the clock the boss just vanished, along with the event instructions, the circle around the settlement that marked the limit of the event area and the icon on the map. All was as it once was. The event might never have happened.

The two players ran off to do whatever they were going to do next. I stopped to look in my bags and see what I'd looted, which was when I realised that, for me at least, there was a consolation prize after all. The whole time I'd been there, the event instructions had been taking up the space where the regular Stronghold details would be. There were three sets of things I needed to do to complete the Stronghold and I'd unwittingly done all of them. So that was nice.

Nicest of all, though, was the drop I got at some point. I'm not sure if it came from a mob or if I looted it from a storage chest but either way it set a precedent I found exciting. Somehow, I'd found myself a sign-board.

Just don't ask me to check your tires.

I love it when games include house items as drops. It always makes for a pleasant surprise when I get one unexpectedly and I'll go out of my way for one if I know it's there. It makes sense to put in the effort. I frequently get more use and pleasure from furniture than I do from gear. I mean, you never level out of an oil painting like you do a pair of pants, do you? 

The sign I got comes from a gas station. It shows the price of gasoline and diesel in an unspecified currency. Diesel is cheaper than petrol, which is the opposite of where I live, these days, although it would have been true a few years ago. 

I hung it up on the outside wall of my house and it looks great. I just hope I don't get any customers. They're going to be mighty disappointed.

As a first experience, I was very impressed with the event. It seemed to run smoothly and it was nicely tuned for a handful of players of the appropriate level for the area. I suspect, had I known what to do, it might even have been soloable. It felt like it might have been scaling. 

All it really lacked was instructions in English and I'm sure those'll come soon enough. It certainly made me keen to keep my eye out for more such "Randomly Triggered Public Crisis Events". Maybe next time I run across one I'll be able to beat it and find out if the rewards are any good. 

When it comes to public events, though, it's not the rewards. It's the taking part that matters, isn't it? At least that's what I learned from a decade playing Guild Wars 2...