The Games I'm Playing Stay The Same

 

It's now clear to me that Wuthering Waves is an anime I watch, not a game I play. There is the minor inconvenience of having to press the space bar to move the dialog along every so often and the major nuisance of having to stop and fight something once in a while, but fundamentally, I log in when there's a new episode, watch it, then log out until the next one drops. There's a new one next week and I'm looking forward to it in just the way I would if it was a new season of a show I liked.

 

In theory, I ought to be doing much more than just the MSQ. There's a huge, open world, plenty of side-quests and companion stories and a whole raft of activities that would easily occupy my time for hours and hours. But I'm not doing any of them.

 

Instead, any time I feel like playing an anime-style MMORPG, I fire up Crystal of Atlan instead. CoA is nowhere near as good as Wuthering Waves. It doesn't have the storyline, the characters, the graphics or the game design to give WW a run for its money. By comparison it's paper-thin. And yet I keep choosing to play it instead.

 

Partly, as I've said before, it's the sheer number of things to do in Wuthering Waves that puts me off. Apparently you can indeed have too much of a good thing. Mostly, though, it's the way the story is delivered, which does feel extraordinarily like a tv show.

 

It takes me three or four hours each time to get through the new chapter, which is very comparable to the time it takes to watch the eight or ten episodes of a single season of a show. Then, when that's done, there's a month or two to wait before the next chapter, which feels like an accelerated version of the wait for the next season.

 

To complete the comparison, most of the time I really am doing nothing but watching a screen. The amount of interaction required seems to get smaller every time. It really has reached the point now, where I think I'd prefer it if there was an actual show I could watch instead.

 

This morning I sat through the full seven and a half minutes of the trailer for next week's update, Version 2.5, Unfading Melody of Life. Here it is so you can have the pleasure, too.

 

The main story is still the prime focus, insofar as it comes first, but it only takes up two and a half minutes of the run-time. The rest of the trailer, more than twice as long, goes through all the other new stuff that's coming, almost none of which I'm interested in and much of which I don't even understand.

 

I can see there are some changes to Echoes that I'm probably going to have to pay some attention to if and when the difficulty increases, although it's by no means certain that will happen. If anything, the game has gotten easier since I started playing. There's also something called "Special Story Experience" that caught my attention, but it's not explained in any way so I'm just going to have to wait and see if it's relevant to me.

 

I'm looking forward to seeing where the story goes next and I'll be happy to find out more about Phrolova and the Fractsidus. It's always entertaining when that mysterious organization turns up and causes trouble. Other than that, everything else, I imagine, I can and will ignore. 

 

Over in Crystal of Atlan, I dinged 50 earlier in the week. Only ten more levels to go and I'll be at the cap. I imagine it will happen. Nothing seems to getting much more difficult although I do need to keep upgrading my gear, something I rarely bother to do in Wuthering Waves, so I guess technically CoA is more challenging in terms of combat.

The reverse is very much true when it comes to the story. CoA is very straightforward. It reminds me a little of reading a children's picture-book sometimes, in that there are a lot of declarative statements, simple observations and didactic explanations. Nuance, subtlety and complexity are mostly absent.

 

That goes well with the art style, which also has a picture-book look about it, but the combat is comparatively convoluted, involving a lot of combos and dodging as well as a surprising amount of in-combat interaction with objects in the environment - ringing bells, climbing ladders, leaping on and off moving platforms and the like.

 

Consequently, it feels a lot more like playing a game, which I think may be why I choose it over Wuthering Waves every time I find myself thinking "Hmmm. I'd like to play a game now..." 

 

Falling between the two extremes on my current gaming calendar is Marvel's Midnight Suns. Actually, it doesn't so much fall between them as set them up as two opposite poles between which the player constantly needs to switch. 

 

I can see why there was so much pushback from players at launch. It's quite irritating to have to swap to what is effectively a completely different game every so often just to get to the point where you can go back and carry on playing the game you wanted to be playing in the first place.

 

The way it seems to work - I've only been through one cycle so far - is that you move through the storyline in a pedantically chronological and literal manner, constantly switching from one mode to the other. 

 

After the tutorial you move to a base, where all the characters either live or are staying as guests for the duration of the crisis. From there, you select missions, so far one at a time with no choice, to which you travel by portal. On arrival a fight starts almost immediately. That's the tactical RPG part of the game, which is what I "bought" it for and which would, I imagine, have been the reason most people did. 

 

The game lets you move back and forth, going on missions, throughout the course of a day and doing practical stuff back at base but when night comes you have to stay at the base for a "Hangout" or a "Club Meeting", something which mostly involves deep and meaningful conversations with other members of the team.

 

The conversations aren't bad but they definitely aren't so fascinating I look forward to them. Looking it up, I see that there is in fact a way to avoid Hangouts, although it's not recommended because you get good bonuses from doing them. Also that they don't seem happen as often as I imagined. There appear to be more complaints about too few Hangouts in the game than too many. Maybe Firaxis tweaked it post-launch or maybe the complaints at the start were from people over-reacting without really knowing how it all worked. Not like that ever happens...

 

The hangout part of the game has slightly put me off playing, though. I tend to play tactical RPGs quite specifically so I can enjoy some turn-based combat on demand, which makes having to plod through a bunch of conversations to get to the fights quite irritating. The actual fights thmselves are good fun though, so I will put up with the inconvenience. For now, anyway.

 

I can't help thinking it would have been a lot better if they'd picked more interesting characters, though. Then I might have wanted to talk to them. But then, post MCU, I'm increasingly finding Marvel characters very bland compared to their pre-MCU comic versions or, indeed, to just about any characters from DC, either pre- or post-DCU. They all seem to have a whiff of the corporate about them these days.

 

Finally on my gaming schedule, I'm still plugging away at Overseer in EverQuest II. Just before I started this post, I dinged Overseer 55, for which there's an Achievement, although it's still five more levels to the next tier. When I reach that, I'll finally be up-to-date. It'll have only taken me about six months...

 

With luck I should have it done by the end of the summer, so I'm well on track for the Autumn/Winter expansion.

Games For A Wet Weekend

I did a lot more gaming than usual this weekend. For one thing, I wasn't working and for another the sun wasn't out. 

It was raining, in fact, which literally put a dampener on my natural inclination to be outdoors in the summer when the sun is shining. I think it's inbred in English people of a certain age, those of us who were brought up at a time when children old enough tie their own shoelaces were ushered out of the house after breakfast and expected to entertain themselves until at least lunch, if not tea. 

Even now I get that nagging feeling that I ought not to be "wasting the sunshine". Of course, it doesn't help that we see so little of it most of the time. It takes a good few fine days in a row before it starts to feel okay to stay inside. This is what happens when you live in a temperate climate.

The games I chose to play were interesting to me. I've been posting a fair amount about all the choices available and yet when I do find myself with both the time and the inclination to settle in for a few longer sessions, my choices often surprise me.

The steady, reliable pick is almost always EverQuest II, which I have been playing for more than two decades now with barely a break. I did drop the game  between 2012 and 2014, something I can date quite accurately because the two expansions for those years, Chains of Eternity and Tears of Veeshan, are the only ones I didn't buy and play on release. That was because I was full-time in Guild Wars 2 around then.

I came back with 2014's Altar of Malice, after which I played GW2 as my main MMORPG and EQII as my secondary, quite consistently, until I eventually dropped GW2 three years ago, at which point my involvement with EQII largely carried on unchanged. Maybe I play a little more of it these days but it certainly hasn't filled the space left by GW2's departure from the schedule.

At the moment, all I'm doing in EQII is Overseer dailies, which I've now managed to work up to the point where I only need to log in once in the morning to set all ten, then once again in the evening to collect the rewards. 

The recent news that the summer update will come with yet another free set of at-cap gear to encourage lapsed players to jump back into the game has to some extent made my efforts to catch up with Overseer seem unnecessary but that's a trap I don't intend to fall into again. It's how I got into this mess in the first place. I might not need the drops from Overseer but I need to level it up so it's capped when the expansion comes out because there will be things I need from it then and I won't be getting them until they, too, have been superseded if I don't do the hard grind now.

That all only takes a few minutes, though. With plenty of time and enthusiasm to play this weekend, I took the opportunity to return to Once Human, which has just received an absolutely huge update. Starry deem it so significant they've labelled it Once Human 2.0.

And they're not exaggerating. It has genuinely game-changing implications, with the new scenario, Endless Dream, opening up the whole map, North and South, for free play from the start and the update adding a completely new Class System and a whole new feature, almost a game mode, called Dreamland Fantasia. 

 

Up to now the game has been classless, Now, you can still choose to be a "Freelancer", which means you carry on the same as always, but you also have the choice of three Classes - Beastmaster, Chef or Gardener. Because this is Starry, they can't do anything in a normal way, so the Class system is in "public testing", by which they mean they've added it to the live servers as a work-in-progress with the intention of  "refining" it based on player feedback. That always works so well, doesn't it?

My feedback so far is that they ought to move the feeding trough a lot further back towards the start of the crafting tree. I picked Beastmaster (Well, of course I did.) but I have nothing to say about it yet because before you can use your whistle to get your pet to obey you, you have to tame the creature and to tame it you have to feed it and I can't.

It says in the description that you can either put food and water in a feeding trough or throw it on the ground but my wolf ignored anything I dropped next to it. I did a bit of research and it appears that method of feeding had already been proved not to work in animal breeding, a feature of the game I've never bothered with and from which some aspects of Beastmaster play have clearly been derived. 

 

Unfortunately, to make a feeding trough requires steel ingots and steel is several stages into the smelting process, meaning I need not only to have upgraded my smelting to that stage but also my ability to craft pickaxes. Steel is made from iron and you need a bronze pickax for that. 

Progression in Once Human is very fast so I had no issues with gaining the points required to open all the necessary nodes on the crafting tree but even with that done, I still have to go out, find some iron, mine enough of it, bring it back and smelt it (Along with some sintered bricks, also a few stages into the process.)  before I can make a trough to feed and water my wolf. Plus I need some metal parts from scavenging, which means either a lot of exploring or fighting...

Consequently, I am still a Beastmaster in name only, not yet having tamed a beast. It reminds me very much of becoming a Beastlord in EverQuest, when the class was first introduced and you had to slog through the first nine levels on your own before you were deemed fit to partner up with a pet. 

It doesn't help that, when I was playing yesterday, for some reason I still can't explain, I also picked two cooking specializations, which would very clearly have gone much better with the Chef class. It's all a bit of a mess and I'm wondering whether I might have to re-roll and start over. As I said, progress is really quick, so it wouldn't be very hard to catch up and at least I might have a better idea what I was doing this time.

The new scenario looks fun. It involves the dream plane invading reality and comes with a lot of hallucinogenic changes to the landscape, something Starry's artists seem to just love doing. It's one of the biggest attractions of the game for me because it means you barely have to touch the actual content itself to get the full impact of the spectacular visual changes. 

It's a very smart way of re-using the same zones over and over without either replacing them or removing the existing content. You're in the same place each time, with the same NPCs and quests and locations but there's a whole load of weird lighting effects or objects floating in the sky or bizarre weather and it freshens everything up no end.

It has a good deal to do with why I don't seem to mind having to start over all the time but I would still like to get settled on a permanent server so I didn't have to build a new house every time I come back. The 2.0 version of Once Human finally offers the combination I wanted all along - full map access and permanence - so hopefully this might be the endpoint for that journey.

There's an incredibly long and detailed set of patch notes covering the classes, the scenario and more that I won't even begin to try and summarize, let alone go through point by point. Once Human, always confusing structurally, now has so many twists and turns it's very hard to keep any of it straight.

It reminds me in a way of Fortnite, where the original concept was very simple and streamlined and then the developers just kept bolting more and more bits onto it until you couldn't tell what it was any more. I was put in mind of Epic's moneymaker when I clicked on a pop-up in Once Human yesterday, thinking it was going to take me to a dynamic event and it actually took me to the new Dreamland Wonder fairground, a large island instance filled with mini-games.

They're good games, too, some of them. I tried the jumping puzzle, which is visually spectacular and not impossibly difficult. I would have loved to take lots of pictures but I was pretty sure if I stopped to use the camera I'd have fallen off something so I only took a couple. Then I did a race, which was great fun and would have been better still if I'd realized it was a full-contact sport. I got knocked off my motorbike by another player not long after the start, which is my excuse for not finishing the course before the timer ran out.

What with all the scenarios running on separate servers and none of them ever going away and Eternaland and Dreamland and the seaside resort I forget the name of, Once Human is already starting to feel more like a game platform than a single, coherent game but I don't think that's a bad thing at all. 

Even though it sometimes seems it's been in spite of Starry's best efforts, I think Once Human is finally maturing into a very solid, entertaining, enjoyable experience. It has a large, stable population and a Very Positive rating from five thousand recent reviews on Steam, up from Mostly Positive from lifetime reviews. If you've wondered about trying it but have been concerned by the various, well-advertised issues, now might be a good time. 

When I wasn't playing Once Human this weekend, I was playing Crystal of Atlan. Why? Good question...

I suppose the obvious answer is "Because it's fun". And it is. It's cheerful, upbeat, colorful and fairly easy still, although not a complete cake-walk. Whatever the reason, it continues to be the icon my mouse pointer feels magnetically drawn towards every time I think I'd like to play something but don't quite know what.

Progress is trucking along comfortably. I dinged three times yesterday, finishing at Level 47. I now know there are sixty levels in total so a max level character doesn't feel out of the question. 

Not an awful lot happened while I was playing. The big news is I finally managed to get rid of the stupid maid outfit and replace it with something at least slightly less embarrassing. Now I look like I'm on a smoke break from the fortune-telling concession at the Renaissance Fayre but it's definitely an improvement. 

I bought the new outfit with one of the numerous in-game currencies. It was one of the most expensive items but I'd acquired enough coins without even trying so that's a positive for the way the game's been monetized.

Gameplay-wise, I finished Chapter Three of the MSQ and started Chapter Four. The storyline isn't very subtle or complex but it's entertaining enough to keep me engaged. 

I did get some laughs out of Conrad, a senior member of the Church, who I had pegged for a villain almost the moment he opened his mouth. His explanations for his experiments on an innocent bunny rabbit, which he was claiming were intended to heal the injuries said rabbit sustained while helping me in a dungeon (Don't ask...) were so obviously sociopathic I was literally shouting at the screen. I'd say the way no-one else saw through him beats me only it doesn't. I know exactly why that was - everyone is either gullible or innocent to the point of imbecility.

One odd thing that happened was that for some reason I started clicking my mouse pointer on the hotbar icons for my skills instead of using the keyboard as I had been doing. CoA is one of those equal-opportunity games that has action controls and tab-target hotkeys and doesn't care which you use. 

In the old days I'd always have clicked but it's an indication of just how many action games I've played that I didn't even think of playing that way until yesterday. When I got to doing it, clicking felt... I don't know... the same? Maybe better but not really? It wasn't a big difference either way, that's about the only thing I'm sure of.

I did a lot of dungeons and beat all the bosses, except one, without having to use a Revive potion, which is a very good result for me. The game is clearly designed to allow you to brute force your way through dungeons, using a potion to get up every time the boss kills you, putting you back at full health but leaving them still wherever they were. There doesn't seem to be a limit on how many times you can do it in a single fight, although I haven't tested it. Three times is the most I've needed in the game so far. Once has mostly been enough.

If I can beat the boss without a revive, I call it a clean win. All but one of my wins yesterday were clean, even if some were very close calls. My feeling is that I would have died a couple more times if I'd been using the keys instead of clicking because I think I was timing my attacks better with a click and on those close fights even one good combo that might not have landed otherwise could have made the difference. 

Hard to be sure but I think I'll stick with the clicks for a while. It's all still at least 80% button-mashing, however I do it, so let's not get any ideas I know what I'm doing.

How much gaming I'll be doing this week remains to be seen. The weather forecast is very different. Lots of sunshine and getting hotter and hotter. I suspect that will mean less time at the PC although it's possible it might even get too hot to want to be outside for a while so my preferences might all loop round and come back in on themselves. 

Whatever the weather, one game will still get its due time every day. Those Overseer dailies have to be done, rain or shine.

Thinking And Drinking

Sometimes I wonder if I even like MMOs any more. MMORPGs. Whatever.

Certainly, the "MM" part no longer has any real relevance for me. I rarely even bother with the big, hot-join events these days and the idea of linking up with other players in a formal group to do small-group content seems both slightly dangerous and faintly ludicrous, like it would be if I tried to go back and do some other things I enjoyed doing when I was much younger, climbing trees or vaulting over fences, say.

The Online part, once so thrilling, feels like more of a necessity than an attraction now. Everything is online these days. It's not something anyone gets excited about any more. I rarely bother to think about it. The whole concept sits at about the same level in my consciousness as electricity - I'm vaguely aware it has to be there in the background, making stuff happen, but I don't consider it to be material to whatever pleasure I'm deriving from whatever it is I'm doing. 

As for the RPG, if we're going to go all the way to the bottom of the niche we've dug for ourselves, I doubt there's any meaningful definition we could all agree on any more. Those three letters clearly no longer have much of a connection to the words they used to represent and I'm not even convinced they relate to the same kinds of progression mechanics they once implied, either. 

Whether I still like or don't like MMO(RPG)s is unclear but either way I don't seem to be playing many and when I stop to think about it, I haven't for several years. About the only true MMORPG I still put any significant amount of time into is EverQuest II, where I do at least play through each year's expansion storyline and do the minimum required outside of that to ensure I have a character capable of handling the newer content.

Eyes left, buster!

Even there, though, I play the game entirely like a solo RPG, something the developers have openly supported for a long, long time. Just about every kind of content in EQII is available in parallel for either soloists or groups, including one hundred per cent of the narrative and story, marking a recognition on the part of the team of the audience they're serving. 

That's increasingly common in older MMORPGs, many of which have done more than lip service to enabling solo play. We hear an awful lot from the other side of the fence, the smaller developers seeking to bring back the glory days of grouping from fifteen or twenty years ago but all the traffic in the established titles has been going the other way for years. 

There is, of course, room for all denominations under the very broad MMO church and some of these retro games will be successful and popular within their sphere of influence. It's just not likely to be a very big sphere.

Despite my decreasing interest in playing any of them, there do still seem to be quite a lot of fairly successful new games that it wouldn't be unreasonable to call MMOs or even MMORPGs. New ones pop up all the time, some of them making quite splash. The latest, Dune: Awakening, the Funcom MMO/Survival hybrid that just launched, has been both a critical and commercial success. 

A while back I'd have felt honor-bound at least to try it but now I have no desire to play it even for free, something if precedent tells us anything, may one day be an option. As has been observed , and often, many, maybe most, of the MMOs that launch to huge acclaim and great commercial success lose most of their population in a matter of months, after which there's a slow drift down until, if they're lucky, they reach some kind of equilibrium at around ten per cent of their initial population, by which point they're willing to let anyone in for nothing. 

Play one I know!

I suspect D:A will avoid any such embarassment, though. My sense is that games that promote survival mechanics, even when they employ those mechanisms in the service of a broadly MMORPG agenda, tend to do better than those that wear their MMORPG colors proudly. 

I'm less than sure whether the evidence bears that out and I'm not really prepared to do the research necessary to prove or disporove it. It's just a theory based on casual observation and that nebulous aura that sometimes surrounds games that are doing quite well rather than quite badly, which admittedly may have more to do with the skill of their PR departments than the sustained success of the games themselves.

Successful or otherwise, one thing that's less likely to be disputed is the degree to which both survival games and sandboxes have moved in on the territory that used to belong to theme-park MMORPGs. I can remember when both were considered somewhat niche, while theme-park MMORPGs were thought of as about as mainstream as the genre got. I'm not sure that's the case any more, even if almost every list of the most popular MMORPGs in 20205 is still dominated by theme-parks such as World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online.

I have, as I so often seem to do these days, wandered off whatever point it was I started out trying to make. I'm not really all that interested in re-hashing yet again all the old arguments about which games are succeeding or failing, something for which we never have the data needed to come to any solid conclusions anyway. 

What I was hoping to talk about were the reasons why I might have drifted away from the one true path I'd followed so fervently and monomaniacally for the more than two decades. Why am I playing so many games now that aren't MMORPGs?

I'm gonna feel it in the morning but right now I don't care.

Partly it's just the inevitable attrition caused by spending so much time doing the same thing, although I'd be fooling myself if I tried to pretend most of those same things don't still feel pretty satisfying and entertaining. It's not as though I've switched to playing completely different kinds of games, anyway. Much of what I've played these last five years has felt quite similar to what I played in the twenty before. I'm still mostly fighting monsters, leveling up, improving my gear and stats, decorating houses and gathering materials for crafting. The loops have scarcely changed at all.

When it comes to the newer games, the difference isn't really in the mechanics so much as the settings. It's a surprise to me but I think I might finally have found the limits of my tolerance for traditional high-fantasy. I can't summon up the motivation to care about all the Tolkein-inspired races any more and I really don't care to invest my limited intellectual capital in another imaginary pantheon or dynasty.

With the glaring exception of Valheim, which is still by a long way my most-played game on Steam, most of the games I've found, played, enjoyed and written about in the last few years don't really fall into the European Medieval trope so long dominant in the genre. To be fair, an awful lot of them still draw from it one way or another but they hide it beneath layers of rather more interesting local color, which these days suits me a lot better than listening to a bunch of elves and dwarves banging on endlessly about how everything's gone downhill since the Golden Age, when they were in charge.

Ever since The Secret World I've been hoping for something with either a more contemporary or futuristic setting that also has a touch of the supernatural. It's taken me a while to realise that my wishes have largely been granted, just not by traditional MMORPGs.

Can I just get a beer?

Once Human is probably the closest game in feel to TSW I've tried but Nightingale isn't far off, either and the reason I'm looking forward so much to Neverness To Everness is that it looks as if it might tick almost all those boxes even harder. It has the look and the theme. What it isn't is an MMORPG. Or it is. One or the other.

But who cares? It's becoming very hard to tell just what boxes these things will fit most comfortably into, by which I don't just mean the definitions have stretched and blurred, even though they have. I frequently find myself playing games these days without actually knowing whether I'm playing them with other people or not.

That seems unlikely but it's true. I said at the top of the post that, when I play MMORPGs now, I play them almost entirely solo. It affects my understanding and awareness of what I'm doing to such an extent that more than once, when I've been working on a post about a game here, I have quite literally had to go look up whether it was single-player or or multi-player because even though I'd played it, from context and experience I couldn't tell.

That was the case for Genshin Impact, which always felt like a multiplayer game even though it isn't. It has a co-op option but unless you invoke it it's 100% single-player and yet when I was there it always seemed like I was playing an MMO. 

I dunno. Is there any way I can stop you?

The runaway success of that game led to a flood of somewhat similar titles, several of which I've played, a couple of which I'm still playing, and I couldn't immediately tell you if all of those are single or multi-player, either. I'd have to stop and try to remember if I've seen other players in the cities to be sure and even then I have to think twice, in case those "other players" were actually NPCs. 

When you can't even remember if you're playing an MMO or not, does it really matter any more?  It did used to matter to me quite a lot. There are posts on this blog where I make policy statements about the importance of being in a shared space with others, even when you don't directly engage with them. I make reference to immersion and authenticity and all sorts of similarly ill-defined concepts.

And now it seems none of that matters as much as it used to, if it even matters at all. All that matters is whether I'm having a good time. And I am. These new games are fun, which it alos seems like the older ones should have been, and yet were they? I'm not sure I can tell any more.

I wonder if what's really holding my interest is the unexpected and largely unecessary level of detail. I spent twenty minutes in a bar in Crystal of Atlan a couple of days ago, having the kind of experience I always wanted to have in bars in games since I first played EverQuest. I could talk to the staff and the customers, I could sit at a table and order a drink and see someone bring it to the table and see myself pick it up and drink it. The drink gave a buff and there was a board on the wall you could interact with that showed you where you stood in relation to other customers in terms of your ability to get a bunch of drinks down you. 

I told you I could ride a horse!

Best of all, I could go up to the stage and chat to the woman providing the evening's entertainment and then sit back down and listen to her play two actual songs, all the way through. And they were strange songs, too.

And yes, you can do some of that in Lord of the Rings Online and they do it very well there, and I was very impressed by that the first time I saw it, too. And of course in LotRO you might very well get a real band that plays songs you recognize. And there are plenty of other MMORPGs that have musical instruments and bars and sitting and drinking animations and why am I even talking about this one as if it's any different?

I don't know and that's the point. I don't know. What I do know is that the pared-down, accessible nature of the gameplay in certain modern online games that use many of the mechanics familiar from older MMOs feels a lot more engaging to me right now than it does in the source material, as do the somewhat more contemporary-feeling storylines and settings. 

Or maybe I've just had to listen to one too many dwarf sit down and sing about gold. 

Last First Impressions Of Crystal Of Atlan

When I posted my first impressions of Crystal of Atlan back at the end of May, I certainly didn't think I'd still be posting about it a month later. Let's face it, my record for sticking with new games is abysmal these days. It never was great but at least I used to manage a month or two before running off after the next new fad. 

This year, with my gaming time at what has to be an all-time low since I first started playing PC games somewhere around 1997 or1998, any new game I take a look at can consider itself lucky if I come back for a second session. If I was interested in self-flagellation, I could go back through this year's posts and tally up all the games I've posted about once or twice and never again. It'd be a lot.

Let's not run away with the idea that I've played a lot of Crystal of Atlan, though. This will be the fifth post I've written about the game and that won't be too far off the number of sessions I've played. I haven't been counting but I'd guess it's no more than seven or eight. Still, that's a lot more than I was expecting, when I downloaded the game on a whim.

Given that there are very many better games I could be playing, plenty of them as new and some of them already sitting on my hard drives, why is COA the one that keeps getting the nod? It's a more-than-decent anime-styled action RPG that looks good and tells a good story but there are literally dozens of those. Why this one?

I wish I knew. It's not just "because it's there". As I said, I have plenty of games already installed, just waiting for me to choose them, some even in the exact same genre. And yet somehow, when the mood comes over me to play a video game, something that happens less and less often as the sun keeps on shining and being outdoors seems like a much better plan than sitting in front of a screen, it's Crystal of Atlan that gets the nod.

There's the dopamine hit, of course. My one and only character dinged 42 yesterday. That's quite fast progress and it comes in spurts, often at the end of a dungeon, when all the accumulated xp is dumped on her at once and she jumps a level or two at a stroke. That feels good.

The game also employs my favorite method of gear upgrades, drops from mobs. That's not the only way they come but it's how I've been getting most of mine and it's a significant attraction and another dopamine hit. Why developers ever moved away from gear drops to points systems and quest rewards beats me.

Then there's the look and feel of the thing. In recent years there's been a torrent of very good-looking games, to the point where I feel the baseline for "acceptable" is now somewhere above what would have classed as "outstanding" just a few years ago. COA doesn't stand out as particularly impressive by those standards but it certainly meets them and more by dint of its unfussiness and concentration on making a big, splashy impression.

Where other games of its kind offer a mutiitude of small details to create their worlds, this one sticks with the big picture. Everything is oversized and most of it seems to be built out of slabs. The place feels solid. There's also no shortage of neon and stained glass and everything is brightly colored, often in single tones. It's not subtle but it works.

The game describes the setting as "Magitech" and the style as "anime" but for my money the overarching aesthetic is "children's picture-book". It has that illustrative look to it, designed to appeal to an audience not quite old enough to read all the words yet. I'm not saying COA is a children's game, though. Far from it. It's probably just as well if the little ones can't read the words here, given what those words are saying.

I'm not about to say Crystal of Atlan has a great plot or that the writing is inspired. It definitely doesn't and it certainly is not.  It is often charming, though, and quite often amusing. Most importantly, it's a pleasure to read. Mostly it will be reading, too. There's some voice acting but not that much.

There are also plenty of cut scenes but they're much shorter than in some games I could mention and seem to concentrate mostly on scene-setting and local color. One thing I found interesting was that when I looked at the screenshots I'd taken of a couple of cut scenes, I noticed there was a lot more going on than I'd realised as they played out in front of me. Whether that says more about the game or me is another question. 

The plot as far as I've followed it mostly revolves around drug dealing, corruption and child exploitation, which it has to be said is an unusual approach for a game of this nature. Of course, the drug in question is a magitech performance enhancer with side effects that turn people into monsters and the children are Dickensian street urchins with amazing thieving and combat skills, but still...

Speaking of combat, it's good fun so far. I read an opinion piece over at MMOBomb earlier, where the writer, Mathew D'Onofrio, tried his first gacha action RPG and was impressed with the look of the thing but much less so with the combat. "Looks Good, Plays Bad" was his tl;dr.

That game was yet another new anime-gacha-action RPG I'd never heard of: Mongil: Star Drive. You can't throw a stone without hitting one of the damn things nowadays. 

What he didn't like about the combat was that there wasn't enough to do: "all I was doing was left-clicking, occasionally dodging with the right mouse button, and spamming Q and E for skills and ultimates." He followed that up with another complaint: "It felt like I was brute-forcing my way through every fight."

I quoted that in full because it does a fair job of summing up what I like about combat in Crystal of Atlan. The less I have to do, the better I like it. That said, there's actually quite a bit more to COA's combat than Mathew found in M:SD. I can't quite remember what it is but I know I was hitting more than just two buttons. (1,2,3,4, for skills, 5 for the pet, R for potions, Q and E for specials/ultimates, shift for dodge...)

Whatever it is, it's manageable for the moment. No doubt it will spiral over my skill ceiling at some point but so far it's comfortably below it and I'm enjoying the fights. Just as well because it is pretty much a fighting game, with an inverse ratio of combat to dialog as Wuthering Waves. 

Perhaps the biggest draw so far is the set pieces. Some of those are very impressive. Last session, I had one of those classic fights on top of a moving train. It was visually thrilling, as I would have loved to have taken some screenshots to demonstrate, but it was take photos or don't fall off and I chose to keep my footing.

The current series of dungeons I'm enjoying give a nod to Alice in Wonderland but really seem more like a fairground. It's a big upgrade, visually, from the sewers and back alleys of the previous chapter. It's nicer to be fighting in a clocktower filled with stained glass windows or next to a whirling carousel with prancing painted horses rather than a tunnel filled with sludge, that's for sure.

There's a whole exploration side to the game that I haven't yet... erm... explored, where you can search for collectible cards and take photos in scenic areas. I'm a lot more likely to do that when there are attractive views all around. 

The animations are striking, too. I used not to be much of a one for animations but play enough action RPGs and you start to get a taste for them. I very much enjoy the way my character does leaps and flips and I spend as much time doing it as I can when there's a fight going on. Whether it helps I'm not sure but it feels good and if I could get a screenshot I bet it'd look good, too.

The thing I'm most displeased with is what my character's wearing. It's still that embarassing maid's outfit. I really need to look into how to get something less humiliating. Of course, I could always spend some money and buy an outfit in the cash shop. That'd be a first!

As that last paragraph suggests, I think I'm rapidly approaching the point where I'll need to do some proper research on how the game works, what there is to do and how to get the best out of it all. Otherwise I fear I'll just be funnelled down the main storyline into dungeon after dungeon, which will most likely cease to be fun as soon as the fights start to be in any way challenging.

At Level 42 I really ought to be past the First Impressions stage anyway, so I think this is going to be the final post in that line. Next time - if there is a next time - I might have to start talking about the game as a game, not just a novelty. 

If I ever get that far, I'd call it a win for Crystal of Atlan. 

Crystal Of Atlan: The Fleet's In!

I was out for much of the day and I didn't have any particular ideas for a post so I was going to skip a day but then I thought why not just do something quick about Crystal of Atlan? So here it is.

Last time I wrote about the game I was level 27. Now I'm Level 32. I did notice that the last level took about as long as the three before it, so maybe the pace is slowing down. Or maybe I just wasn't doing anything that gave much xp. 

In the caption to one of the screenshots last time, I mentioned I hadn't found out what the Fleet thing was about yet. Well, I have now. A Fleet is CoA's version of a Guild. There's a short quest that explains it and sends you to look at a notice board where Fleets recruit. 

Being an antisocial git, I usually don't bother with guilds or clans or whatever the local jargon is but if the game allows me to make one and keep it to myself, I always take advantage. CoA does that, so I made my regular guild of one and with it I got an airship.

I was quite excited about that. Who wouldn't be? It turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax though. The airship consists of the upper deck and that's about all. It's in a private instance and you can wander about the deck and look at the view, which is nice, but you can't go inside. 

As far as I can tell, you can't decorate it either, so it isn't what I'd call housing. The little room you get in the starting town is more of a home than the airship. At least that has a bed youcan lie down on and a gramaphone that actually works.

The airship does have some facilities. There's an NPC that gives Fleet missions and another that runs a shop where you can spend the currency you get for doing them. Since they most likely are tuned for actual fleets with more than one member, I don't imagine I'll be doing many, but who knows?

As you can see from the screenshots above, the in-game camera doesn't seem to work on the airship or in dungeons, either, so I'm thinking it may not work in any instances. If they offer me the chance to give feedback on any of the surveys (I've already completed two of those.) then that's the first thing I'll be asking them to fix.

It's a shame because the dungeons are really rather nice to look at, even the sewers. I do find Crystal of Atlan very pleasant company visually. 

The story is better than I initially gave it credit for, too. It's nothing out of the ordinary but it does zip along and the plot, entirely unoriginal though it is, has its moments. The character writing is decent, too, which makes the whole thing feel quite jolly. 

As for combat, the difficulty for a mostly unskilled player who's not willing to put in much effort to get any better, as I was describing last time, is somewhat mitigated by the option to revive yourself at full health every time you die. Your opponents don't get the same option, thank heaven, so you can just throw yourself at them and keep getting up every time they knock you down until eventually you just wear them out.

That takes a consumable every time so I imagine it's not a viable, long-term strategy but it's working for me at the moment. I wouldn't need to be doing it at all if I could remember to get my pet fox to heal me in ample time but I keep forgetting until it's too late.

That certainly seems to put the mockers on the idea that CoA isn't a Gacha game. "Premium" pets are Gacha pulls and they have a big part to play in combat. It seems like a fairly arbitrary line to draw, saying your game isn't gacha because there are no gacha characters when there other key systems use the mechanic but fine lines are what these distinctions are all about.

I have yet to get the hang of swapping between my two pets in a fight. Or more to the point, I know the game swaps them for me but I don't really know what either of them can do apart from heal. The fox does that. I think the rabbit is DPS but I really need to look into it.

The rabbit also talks but not in any language you can understand. The fox doesn't seem to talk at all. Lots of NPCs have dialog options if you go up to them and start a conversation, just like they do in Wuthering Waves, although what they have to say isn't as complex and detailed as in the older game. Still, it does make the place feel a bit more lived in, knowing you can strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone.

As you can see from the screenshots, CoA comes with the typical visual clutter of its peers. The last game I played that placed quite so much emphasis on huge overhead titles in over-dramatic fonts was Noah's Heart. 

Strangely, as someone who habitually turns off almost every overhead name and title in any game, I kind of enjoy these. They're so over-the-top I find it endearing. In Noah's Heart, I put some considerable effort into getting the titles I liked and I may well do the same here. 

I certainly don't want to be running around forever with "We're Scaling" over my head, that being the only title I have at the moment. What the heck does it even mean?

I also don't want to spend a moment longer than I have to dressed as a kind of Whitehall farce version of French maid. It's embarassing. Unfortunately, although I do have another, much more suitable outfit I could wear, these "cosmetic" outfits are bursting with combat stats and the maid one is a lot better, so I'm stuck with it. There may be some way to tweak appearance so I don't have to see it. I ought to look into that as well. Or just work on getting something else that's not so dodgy.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say for now. I said it was going to be short and for once it really was! 

Crystal Of Atlan: Further First Impressions

As you might surmise from the picture above, I have been making some progress in Crystal Of Atlan. I'm Level 27 now. This is as much a surprise to me as anyone. I didn't expect to be playing the game much at all after downloading it on a whim, especially since I'm currently not doing a lot of gaming. And anyway, if I was going to pick the pace back up, wouldn't there be a whole load of games more deserving of my time than this one? 

Well, yes, probably. For a start, Wuthering Waves is far more nuanced, sophisticated and aesthetically satisfying and don't I keep going on about how good the story is there? That game is getting a huge content drop in a few days and I haven't even started the storyline from the last one yet.

So, why am I playing CoA instead of WW? I don't think there's a very straightforward answer to that. It's new, of course, which always helps. It's linear and straightforward, which could be a problem later on but which, at the start, makes the game very accessible and easy to follow. 

It's pretty to look at at and while the visual style says anime, the writing feels a lot like a good old Saturday morning cartoon series. The story skips along cheerily and the characters are broadly drawn but with plenty of personality. 

The witch of the mines. She's a baddie. Or is she?

Structurally, there's just enough choice to make it feel as though you have some agency but really it's a straight through-line you're happy to follow. Everything progresses through a series of "dungeons" that a helpful bot teleports you to on request. There's no traveling as such but you can wander around the fairly large and very attractive non-combat areas to get a sense that you're somewhere with substance.

I'm not entirely sure that there isn't some kind of open-world element to the game, anyway. I was wandering around the city the other day, when I bumped into a zone line that popped up a warning about the next area being some kind of combat-enabled area. It made it sound as if there was an open-world area beyond, where PvP might happen, but I was too chicken to go through and find out. 

I could google it but for the moment I'm in that honeymoon phase, where I want everything to surprise me, so I haven't. That's always a sign of a well-designed game and CoA is nothing if not well-designed.

The most significant reason I find myself wanting to log into this game at the moment, rather than any of the dozen or more others I could be playing, is the torrent of new systems and mechanics that just keep on coming. This is true of most games and accounts for a great deal of the excitement and enthusiasm I have for starting over in new ones all the time. 

Classic example; the game told me how to change my appearance and I did but then I still looked the same after. Now I have to figure out how it works, which is my idea of a good time.

It's absolutely an Explorer Archetype thing and if there was ever any doubt that that's my segment of the pie chart, this blog, with its never-ending drip-feed of First Impressions and game reports from the early and mid-levels of games I never go on to play at endgame, proves it. 

I'm sure the exact same aspects of this and many other games, the long introductions where you learn how the game works and what you have to do to survive and prosper in the world that's being revealed, are the very parts that drive so many new players to give up and log out, never to return. A lot of people just want to get on and play the damn game, not fiddle-faddle about with ninety-seven different ways to do stuff they don't care about and never will but for me it's like unwrapping a huge pile of presents under the tree.

And modern F2P titles really do go nuts with the things they give you to do. After a while it does indeed become too much and I'm noticing almost as many burnout stories cropping up in blog posts over there being just too damn many things to do in games these days as there used to be about how much of our lives had to be given over to getting to the point where we could do anything much at all.

The big difference I see between the two eras is that for the most part, the filler developers use to keep us busy these days is far more avoidable than it used to be. The open-world RPGs that are broadly replacing MMOs scarcely seem to respect our time any more than EverQuest or the rest ever did but they also seem a lot more amenable to casual play. You can spend a ton of time and money on them, sure, but you can entertain yourself very nicely in short bursts for free, too.

Building up your vinyl collection: A lot cheaper here than in real life.

How long that will persist in Crystal of Atlan I'm not so sure. One of the main reasons I'm so positive about Wuthering Waves is that so far it's proved not just possible but quite easy to keep up with the main storyline simply by... playing through the main storyline. 

Unlike Genshin Impact, generally acknowledged as the founder of and trend-setter for the genre, a game I liked but had to give up after a few weeks because the fights just got too hard, or even Noah's Heart, where I lasted a lot longer but eventually fell off the main story for the same reason, combat in storyline instances in Wuthering Waves has actually gotten easier as time's gone on. I don't know how long that can last, especially given that the whole business model presumably relies on players wanting to get the latest Resonators for some practical purpose, not just to fill out their collections, but I'm very much there for it so long as it does.

In Crystal of Atlan, though, I can already see the fights becoming more challenging and requiring more skill and I'm not even out of the introductory phase just yet. I wouldn't say I was still in the tutorial but the lessons are still coming even though the story is fully engaged. 

NuVerse make a big thing of how their game isn't a Gacha but of course it is. The swerve is that you don't roll for characters to do the fighting for you, so in that respect I do think it's quite likely the impact of increased difficulty will fall on players' skill instead of  their wallets. 

I know it looks like one but that's not a skill tree. It's the gear progression table and there's a screen like that for every slot on the paper-doll. I mean... why??

Unfortunately for me, I don't have much in the way of skill when it comes to action RPGs and perhaps worse I have a very low tolerance indeed for skill trees, builds and all that kind of nonsense. I never liked it much but the longer I've had to put up with it, the more I'm beginning to see it in much the same way other players see slow leveling or lengthy travel or long blocks of quest text or endless cut scenes: an annoying waste of my time that I should be able to click through or that the game should just take over and do for me.

It's more than just a lack of interest or enthusiasm on my part. I actively dislike having to read skill descriptions and I really, really hate having to try and figure out which one has synergy with which other one. I just want to hit stuff with a big stick or shoot it with a gun and leave it at that. 

So long as I can get away with button-mashing I'll put up with it but once I have to start thinkiong about sequences and putting combos together it all starts to become work. And if I'm going to do work, I either want to get paid for it or have something solid to show for it at the end. 

Beating a boss, just so I can go on to beat the next boss, doesn't motivate me in the same way painting the kitchen wall does. I really don't want to paint the kitchen wall either but at least when I've done it I have a better-looking kitchen and the comfortable knowledge that I won't have to do it again for a few years.

Never mix it with the maid.

Given the way Crystal of Atlan is constructed, I would imagine my time with it will be short for that reason alone. I'm guessing that when the time comes that I can't beat a boss in a storyline dungeon my ability to progress will be put on hold until I figure out how to do it, which I won't because I'll just stop and play something else instead.

Or maybe that won't happen. Maybe I'm negatively projecting. Maybe the devs have already thought about that. There was this odd thing the other day when I was playing...

I was right in the middle of a very hectic fight in a dungeon when Beryl came bouncing in, barking and jumping up at me and instead of carrying on with the fight I stopped and took her out to play. When I came back, my character had died (I literally abandoned her in the middle of a fight so it would have been very odd if she hadn't.).

It was the first time I'd died in the game so I wasn't sure what would happen but I figured at least I'd have to start the instance over from the last save point. Instead, I just ended up back at the questgiver, who congratulated me on a job well done, as though I'd finished the whole dungeon, and the story just carried on. I haven't deliberately gotten myself killed again to test it but wouldn't it be nice if the game just patted you on the head every time you died and gave you a pass to the next stage?

Spoiler: She's down but she's not going to stay down.

Yeah, I doubt that's going to happen. I think the way it's supposed to go is that you start engaging with all the many improvement and enhancement mechanics they've been introuducing you to over the first twenty-five levels and learn to git gud.

I've been shown how to upgrade my armor with spare parts I can get by dis-assembling my old stuff. I've been shown how to socket circuits to make it more powerful. I've been shown how to spend points in the many talent trees. I've been tested to see which Class specialization I'd like to take up and given a whole new skill tree for that. 

I've been introduced to the idea of hiring pets to help me. Pets who have their own stats and skill trees and the whole shebang. You can collect pets and you can have two up at once. And then there are the "cosmetic" clothes, the outfits and what-not. Those turn out to have stats, too. And you can collect those as well. At least they don't seem to have talent trees.

Hmm. "Fleets"? I seem to have missed that one...

It's early days and there's a lot I don't understand yet but it does appear to me that the whole "We don't do Gacha" thing falls apart quite fast when you spot that both pets and costumes, for both of which there most definitely is a gacha mechanic, directly affect your combat-worthiness. Not that I care, since I won't be paying for pulls, but it does seem a tad shifty.

Then again, maybe if you can actually play the game - if you have the knowledge and motivation to figure out a good build and the speed and dexterity to use it effectively - the added boost from pets and cosmetics is just icing on the I Know What I'm Doing cake.

I don't know what I'm doing and I'm not afraid to admit it. But I'm having plenty of fun all the same. We'll see how long that lasts.