Good Things Come

Today's post is a bit of a follow-up to one I wrote back in May, which was itself the forerunner to this one from a couple of days ago. It was going to be a "First Impressions" too, only now it's not, for reasons that will become apparent.

That post back in May talked up two new MMORPGs coming to Steam. One was Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore. The other was Sky: Children of the Light.  Apparently no-one can make a damn game these days without a colon. 

At the time, I said I'd wait until Coreborn went into Early Access to give it a try "if it's cheap enough". The date set for EA was 18 July and I'm pleased to say that date was met. The game is now available to play on Steam, where it will cost you £15.95 (Do your own conversion to Dollars, Euros, Groats or whatever it is they use around your place.)

That's the introductory sale price. There's a 24% discount until 25 July, when it goes back to the full £20.99. Presumably it's 24% off rather than the far more comfortable 25% so as to get a discounted price that ends in a five. Numerology is real.

I had the opportunity to play the game during the last Next Fest. I was pretty hot on it but even so I wasn't planning on jumping onboard the first passing build. I said I was going to "keep it in mind for a later, more fully-functional release, particularly one where progress won't be wiped." 

The Early Access FAQ, which is gratifyingly open and straightforward, makes it more than clear most of the content isn't just unfinished - it's unstarted. There's a long road yet to travel before we reach anything you'd call completion: "We anticipate the game being in early access for one to two years", they say, which, if previous experience is anything to go by, might easily stretch to four or five. 

Add to that the proposed payment model: "Once we leave Early Access, we intend for the game to be free to play" and I don't feel much like throwing money in Coreborn's general direction. It is an odd place we've reached, isn't it? We pay to play unfinished content that we could have for nothing if we'd only wait until it's done. It's lucky for the developers that most gamers seem to have the attention span of a kitten on ritalin and the patience of a toddler having a meltdown.

Coreborn reminds me a little of Project: Gorgon in that it's starting out with a very playable base game but also with big intentions to add many more features. As several bloggers of note have found out, that kind of slow, incremental development, even when sustained with admirable determination and consistency, can lead to a feeling of disconnection. 

There never seems to be a good time to commit to the game in the way it requires because everything is constantly in flux. The game is always going to be better if you hold off for a while. No-one with any self-control can ever get going.

I own a copy of Project:Gorgon thanks to backing the final Kickstarter but I've barely played it since it went into official Early Access, more than five years ago. If that seems like a long time, the P:G EA FAQ is even more unflinching in its honesty than Coreborn's: "Based on our experience with the game's development to date, and accounting for the quantity and quality of content and polish we aim to hit, we expect that Project: Gorgon will be in Early Access until it's ready."

For my money (That I paid more than half a decade ago.) Project:Gorgon has been fit to be declared "ready" for years, now. MMORPGs are famously never feature-complete and you only have to read Stingite's many posts on the game over at The Friendly Necromancer to appreciate just how much content there is already. You'd have no problem settling down there and playing for months

Should you feel like doing that, now would be a great time to start. The game's currently discounted a massive 75%, down from £30.99 to £7.74 (Someone's not scared of even numbers...). The reason for the sale is an unusual one. One of the founders is rather ill and they need someone to take a bit of the weight. 

And apparently sales really do bring in the money: "Our last sale went really well and allowed us to work with the indomitable Nick — the engineer responsible for most of the last year-plus of QoL (Quality of Life) improvements. Imagine what we can do with another Nick".

Even though I might seem to be cheerleading for getting in early, I have to say I won't be taking my
own advice where Coreborn's concerned. My experience with P:G tells me I'd be better holding off until the game's a lot closer to whatever counts as "done". Even the very brief and perfunctory look at the current EA build carried out by MMOBomb suggests it's pretty much the same game I played in Next Fest and that was definitely going to take a while before it was ready for primetime.

None of those caveats really apply to Sky: Children of the Light. It's not an in-development title at all. It's a popular, critically-successful live game already up-and-running on Android and iOS. The only thing that's new about it is it's imminent arrival on PC.

Sky, as I'm going to call it from now on, is currently celebrating it's fourth birthday and there's a party going on. Judging by the video developer That Game Company chose to put up on YouTube, it's one you'd be well advised to skip.

Seriously, it looks horrifically bad. Like someone took a blowtorch to a Roblox instance. Don't take my word for it. Judge for yourself.

Why anyone would use something like that to promote their game beats me. Maybe you need to be twelve to appreciate it - although even as I write the words, I realise I'm insulting tweens everywhere. It looks more like the kind of party a particularly culturaly inept parent might imagine a twelve-year-old would like. Thankfully, the video is at least short. 

The other video they put up to showcase in-game selfie feature, is is far more appealing. I like these kinds of built-in photo suites more and more, to the point that playing older games that don't have them is starting to feel a bit strange. I'd love to have a go with this one.

After I watched the video I went to Steam to wishlist Sky, only to find I already had. There was no news of a release date but as I was looking it occured to me that maybe I didn't need to wait. Didn't I used to play Android games on my PC with some app or other?

I did! For a while I played some mobile-only titles using Nox and I seemed pretty happy with the results.

Unfortunately, Nox doesn't seem quite to have kept up with the times. It's still there but it seems to be  stuck on Android 9. The current version is 12 with 13 due in August. I re-installed Nox and tried anyway but all I got was the old favorite, "This app is incompatible with your device".

Nox isn't the only Android Emulator game in town, not by a long shot. It's not even the best-known. That would be Bluestacks. Back in 2019, when I first tried doing this, Bluestacks was supposed to be a bit more effort to set up, which is why I went with Nox. I don't know if that was really true then but now it's incredibly easy. Unfortunately, Bluestacks won't run Sky for me either.I downloaded and installed Bluestacks X, the version that runs in the cloud and also Bluestacks 5, the one that runs on your own PC. That was the easy part.

The hard part was getting Sky to run on either of them. It was so hard, in fact, I never managed to do it at all. I spent the best part of two hours tinkering with all kinds of options, following suggested settings from the official Bluestacks website, from reddit, from YouTube... nothing worked.

After a lot of tinkering (Most of which I really enjoyed, if I'm honest, although I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if any of it had gotten me into the game.) I finally ran across a reddit thread that suggested Sky had been working fine on Bluestacks until about three days ago, when an update screwed things up.

 Timing. It's all about the timing.

There was a response to the thread from Bluestacks Support saying they were looking into it so I figured the best thing to do would be to wait and see if they'd fix whatever the update broke. I'll try and remember to give it a try in a few days.

If that doesn't work, I guess I'll just have to wait for the Steam launch like a normal person. It ought to be easy but of course it won't. You know the old, familiar feeling; you can have a hundred games ready, all of them just begging you to log in and have fun, but it's always the one that's unavailable for some reason that you just have to play right now...

Sod it. I'm going to go watch The Owl House instead.

Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore Demo: First Impressions

I'll begin with what I told the developers of Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore in the extensive feedback questionnaire I completed after logging out of the demo a couple of days ago: I found the game much more impressive than I expected. I'll also repeat what I told them in the final, "Any other comments" section: they really need to get working on a better trailer because the ones they have now do the game a disservice.

If I'd made my decision purely on what I saw in those videos, I'd never have downloaded the demo. Luckily, this is still an MMORPG blog as much as it's anything and I'm still an MMORPG fan, interested in and occasionally excited by the possibilities inherent in the form. Consequently, I feel a sense of obligation to check out as many new titles in the genre as I can manage and since there never seem to be many MMORPGs in the Steam Next Fest, I can hardly afford to miss one just because the trailer makes it look bad.

Even so, I only downloaded the demo out of a sense of duty. When I first wrote about the game a month ago I was less than enthusiastic, describing it as "worth a punt", which is about as lukewarm a recommendation as you can get. I even declined to link one of the trailers because I thought it was so bad it would actually put people off trying the game.

That trailer, unbelievably, turns out to be the opening of the game itself, the first thing you see when you log in. It absolutely does not make any better impression in context. Indeed, I found it such a teeth-grindingly, jaw-clenchingly awful introduction that I made a quick note to remind myself not to forget how bad it had been when I came to write the review. Verbatim, I wrote

"Terrible voiceover - sound quality appalling - can't understand one word in five."

But you don't have to take my word for it. Here. Watch the blasted thing for yourself, if you can stand it.

I feel comfortable sharing it here because everything else I'm going to say about the game is very positive. I played for over two hours and would happily have gone on playing a good deal longer. As I also said in the feedback I sent to the devs, they have a very solid base already for what looks like a game with considerable potential. It's a great start.

To put a little detail into the picture, the world looks rich, vibrant and attractive; movement is fluid; the UI is clean and efficient; controls are intuitive and comfortable and gameplay is both familiar and immersive. The music is pretty good too but my greatest surprise was finding that, once you get past that abysmal opening, so is the soundscape. 

I removed the UI from most of the shots for aesthetic reasons but it's pretty unobtrusive.

I'll start with that, just because it's such a bizarre contrast. As I said, I literally couldn't understand anything any of the characters said in the opening cut scene, not only because the voice acting was so insanely over the top as to make Andy Serkis doing Gollum sound like Olivier doing Hamlet but because the entire mix is muddy and muffled.

Clearly, if incomprehensibly, that must be a design choice because all the sound in the game itself is crisp, clean and clear. Not only that, but there's a fair amount of voice acting and most of it isn't just competent - it's good! 

The way the Help function is introduced as lore-inflected grafitti is inspired.

The game proper begins with a fairly lengthy sequence in which a goblinesque creature leads you through the streets of what turns out to be the hub city, chatting away in expository fashion to let you know where you are and what you're going to be doing. The creature's dialog was well-written and well-acted, as were most of the several other, lengthy monologues I listened to later, when I explored the area.

Those conversations, if you can call one person speaking and one staying silent a conversation, happen spontaneously when you get close enough to an NPC with something to say. It's quite a sophisticated take on handing out quests, except that at this stage there don't seem to be any. Quests, that is.

If you want me to get you something, just ask! You don't have to tell me your life-story.

It seemed perfectly plain that all of the NPCs that spoke to me had things they wanted me to do. They all led up to a request that I help them out with a problem they were having. But then they just stopped. Presumably at some future stage the mechanics of questing will be patched in and attached to the dialog, which will be fine and dandy, although I quite liked the spurious spontaneity of being buttonholed by people so wrapped up in their own problems they just felt they had to share, even though they didn't, for once, expect me to do anything about it.

There may not be any quests yet but there's plenty to do in the demo. Coreborn describes itself as a open world social survival game and all of that familiar gameplay is present and functioning well. You can gather fungi and fruit to feed yourself, pull bundles of twigs and plant fiber out of bushes to make yourself tools and weapons, kill animals for leather to make armor, chop down trees and break rocks so you can build yourself somewhere to live: all of the usual time-consuming busywork that's proved so popular and compelling to millions of gamers for decades.

Item #1 on the agena: Make myself some clothes!

And you know why there are so many of these games and so many more keep getting made? Because it's fun, that's why. It's gameplay that links into pre-existing receptors in the human psyche that pump out endorphins to reward you for doing what's necessary to ensure your survival. Or something like that. It feels good. It's like a drug.

Coreborn doesn't do anything much to differentiate itself from all the other games it's competing with. It's not trying to be edgy or original. The exit interview is happy to ask you to compare it to other games you've played. It even gives you suggestions. Did you think it was like Valheim? Or Minecraft? I'm pretty sure the devs are hoping you'll say "Why, yes, now you come to mention it, that's just what I was thinking!"

Yes, I tried to cross the bridge. Yes, I fell in the river.

And I'm more than good with that as an ambition. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Just put a nice, firm, tire on it so the ride feels smooth and comfortable and make sure all the nuts are tightened properly so the damn thing doesn't come flying off when we get rolling. 

On the basis of what I saw in this demo, the basic groundwork has been laid for what ought to become an entertaining and satisfying experience. There's a very great deal more to be added and some of the parts that are in place aren't much more than placeholders but the potential is considerable.

Fear my bunch of slapped-together twigs!

One of the obvious placeholders is Combat, which is extremely basic and not much fun. There's only a single, craftable weapon - the Greatsword - with a couple of attacks and a special. There's a dodge mechanic that doesn't work all that well (Or I'm useless at dodging, which is another possibility). 

There's a note in the extensive help section about some animals being aggressive and others not but f there's any way to assess the aggressiveness and difficulty level of an enemy, I couldn't find it. Some creatures kicked my butt in seconds, others didn't seem to fight back much at all, but since the cute design aesthetic leaves all of them looking like candidates for a petting zoo it was hard to tell which to approach and which to avoid.

The game currently has a death mechanic that's more of an annoyance than a penalty. You respawn at the nearest designated location with full health and no loss of experience or skills but you drop all of your inventory except for what you're holding and wearing. You have two hours to collect your stuff from the gravestone that appears where you died, after which it all vanishes forever. 

It sounds harsh but since no-one else can loot your stuff and you respawn at most a few minutes from where you died, where a gigantic glowing purple beam of light descending from the heavens highlights the location of your grave, dying is merely an annoying interruption to your gameplay rather than an actual penalty. 

On your left, a purple beam for your grave. On your right, a blue beam for the hub city.

Since you also revive with full health but whatever killed you doesn't immediately heal up, I found myself farming leather from hard-to-kill creatures by pulling them near my respawn and running back to have a second (Or third.) go. That's something that'll need to be tightened and tidied as development progresses but even as it stands I can't say I wasn't having fun. I don't mind  a few deaths if it gets me what I want in the end.

Other aspects were obviously barebones but fully functional. Crafting at the lowest level doesn't require anything other than the right materials and a button press in the UI but there's provision for crafting stations and trees once you progress. Building has few options but what there is has been implemented with style and works fluidly. The social side of the game, involving banding together to build towns, which then need to be defended against attack (By mobs rather than other players, I think?) looks to be implemented although I didn't have time to try it.

"Hedonist"? Hmm. Interesting choice.

Character creation in the demo is minimalistic. There's only one option, a humanoid with very few cosmetic or physical variations. There are several non-human NPCs in the hub city that look far more interesting, including robots and the ever-popular rat-people but also a much more unusual choice: star-nosed moles. I'd be happy to play any of those.

There seems to be a good deal of quite intriguing lore at the back of the setting in which the player-characters finds themselves. The MMORPG, which is being produced and developed by a German outfit called Blankhans,  is supposedly based on a tabletop game of the same name, although detailed information about that seems oddly hard to come by. 

There's a video about the Pen & Paper version on YouTube that has 1.4m views so someone must have played it. Unfortunately my O-Level German isn't up to a two-and-a-half hour long video so I'm none the wiser.

All in all I was much more impressed by the demo than I ever imagined I would be. If I hadn't developed a certain amount of self-restraint in these matters over the years, I'd be in there now, exploring and gathering and crafting and building, just for the fun of it. I'm a little wiser about these things than once I was, though, so I'm just going to keep it in mind for a later, more fully-functional release, particularly one where progress won't be wiped.

Very definitely one to watch, which is more than I can say for the trailer!

Two More For The Pot

Well, I was going to do a Friday Grab Bag but I left it all day and then Mrs Bhagpuss and I took Beryl for a long walk and when I got back I checked my email to find a reminder that I had three training courses to complete by Sunday and I'm working all weekend...

... so I did those instead.

Which means I'm just going to mention a couple of upcoming games I wishlisted on Steam this afternoon and leave it at that. 

Look To The Sky!

The first is this one, an unusual MMO I hadn't previously heard of. It's called, with immense simplicity, "Sky" and it's been around since 2019 on Playstation, Switch, Android and iOS. 

On Steam, where you can wishlist it already, as I have, it's known as "Sky:Children of Light", possibly because there's already a game called Sky, a city builder, due to be released next month. I don't know when the MMO Sky is likely to surface on Steam but presumably it's imminent because there's a trailer.

It comes from the same people who gave us Journey and Flower, neither of which I've played. I have heard a fair bit about Journey, though, which was a darling of the non-gaming media for a while, mostly, I thought, because it didn't really seem to be much of a game, something that always appeals to the editors of newspaper arts sections.

Given that background, it's hardly a shock to learn Sky is a "social adventure" with no combat. At least I don't think there's any combat. It looks gorgeous and on my Steam page it's tagged as "Similar to games you've played: Yonder", which is enough of a recommendation for me. Yonder is one of them most relaxing, soothing, chill games I've played. I really should finish it sometime.

 

Cor!

The other game isn't quite as interesting to me but it still looks worth a punt. It's called Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore, which is a frankly ridiculous name. It sounds like something Nigel Tufnel out of Spinal Tap would put his name to in some kind of misguided marketing deal that would inevitably go horribly wrong.

The description is full the kind of made-up nonsense words that I thought went out of fashion long ago, "gyrophasm" being my favorite, but the tagline is "An unbelievably funny, Beautiful and exciting fantasy universe" (My emphasis.) so I'm guessing we're not to take meant any of it too seriously. 

Coreborn is "A multiplayer survival game", which is a very crowded field, but it seems to be the latest iteration of an established IP, with both comic book and pen and paper antecedents, which gives it a certain heft. There's a truly dreadful "Official Story Trailer", which I haven't embedded because it will only put people off. Follow the link if you like to look at bad concept art while listening to someone gargling as they impersonate a frog.

The Early Access trailer is better. At least it has a decent soundtrack. The gameplay looks rough but the world looks kind of pretty.

Speaking of the gameplay, there's also a gameplay trailer but it's nearly half an hour long and life's too short for that. I'll wait until the game goes into Early Access on 18 July and see it for myself, if I'm still interested - and if it's cheap enough.

And that, I'm afraid, is all I have until Monday at the earliest. They can't all be epics.