Crystal Of Atlan: Very First Impressions

There's just no consistency, is there? At one extreme there's the likes of Camelot Unchained, a "game" that was announced with a flurry of publicity, drew huge attention and then spent the next dozen or so years locked behind very closed doors, "in development", where it remains even now. And then, at the far end of the curve, you get something like this.

It seems like Crystal of Atlan popped up out of nowhere just a few days ago and then this morning I was playing it. I'd never heard of it until I saw an item on MMOBomb a couple of weeks ago, although apparently the actual reveal was back in March. Still not much of a lead-up, even then.

I didn't pay much attention until the same site followed up yesterday with the news the game had already launched. MassivelyOP, which currently seems to have a weird love-to-hate obsession with gacha mechanics (I think it must be an American thing. I don't really get what the supposed problem is but then every market town over here has about five betting shops on the high street.) also flagged up the release with a headline focusing on the overly-defensive assertion by developer NuVerse (A ByteDance subsidiary.) that CoA "is not a gacha game". Reason being?  "We do not have gacha mechanics for character or weapon pulls".

You get one free summon. Meanies.

Having just spent an hour with the game, I'd have to question that logic. There's a full gacha mechanic for both Pets and Outfits and it looks and feels exactly like every other gacha deal I've seen. I think we'll need to know a bit more about just how essential Pets are to gameplay before we can give the developers a pass on that one. Outfits, I guess, at least aren't likely to be pay-to-win but even there I can't see it's any better if your objection is to the principle of the thing.

Not that I give a damn. I have hundreds and hundreds of hours in multiple gacha games, all of which I've played with considerable enjoyment, and so far I have never needed to pay a red cent to any of them. I have an academic understanding of the problem, if that's what we're going to call it, but no emotional attachment or personal, anecdotal experience to give that understanding any of the sense of loathing or outrage that permeates most of the conversation around gacha mechanics. 

Here's my suggestion for anyone wary of playing F2P gacha games in case it ends up costing them a fortune or making them feel frustrated because they can't progress without paying: just play the damn game for free as long as its fun, then stop the moment you feel you can't do what you want without paying for pulls. In my experience, that's going to take a while.

Okay, one for each draw. Still...

And it's not like there aren't a gazillion other games to play, is it? Or like you signed some kind of contract, where you promised to finish what you started. Can't get any further without spending money and don't want to spend money? Then quit!

Oh, but I want to know how the story turns out! Watch someone playing on Twitch then or watch a play-through on YouTube. Or just read the walktrhough on the wiki. Scratch that itch and move on.

Well, that was a rant I wasn't expecting. Oh well, got it out of my system now. Let's move on...

So, first impressions. Is an hour long enough? Well, I got to Level 10 if that counts. And honestly, the game feels so familiar right from the start, it's as if I could do the First Impressions piece from the opening cut-scene.

So let's start with that, why not? It's short, slick and very pretty to look at. It's also about as generic as they come and whoever wrote it knows that as well as you do. It's like a tl:dr version of the opening of a dozen similar games I've played: there was a cataclysm, a Hero appeared and sorted it out, everything was nice for a while, something got lost, the world turned bad again, now you have to find the maguffin. Some of those parts may not be in the correct order but they were all in there, somewhere.

I'm the one with her back to the camera.

Next comes one of those completely pointless action sequences, where you charge through a "dungeon" following a glowing trail and use a whole load of abilities you have absolutely no understanding of to despatch a horde of entirely unthreatening, disposable grunts, finmishing up with a battle with a massive boss (A dragon in this case. How original!), the outcome of which is entirely out of your hands. The whole thing is made even less useful as a training excercise since the character you're playing keeps changing, although that does do a fair job of demonstrating the playstyles of the various classes, thereby preparing you for...

"Character Creation", which I put in quotes because that's what they call it even though it's patently nothing of the sort. It's just "Pick A Class". That's literally the only choice you have to make. There's one race, human, and all the classes are gender-locked. There's zero customisation of any kind. You don't even get to give yourself a name. (There turns out to be a good reason for that, though.)

Gender-locking is another super-controversial issue and one with which I have a great deal more sympathy than gachaphobia. I would have been pissed if all the classes I wanted to play had been male, for sure. But they weren't, so I'm good. 

Apparently turning her back to the camera is her thing. And, I guess, mine now, too.

All of that took maybe ten minutes and then it was into the world proper. Oh, I did have to choose a server. There were two reccomended ones in North America and third in Europe, which wasn't recommended. That seemed odd. Usually games can tell where I am and assume I want a faster ping. And I might have, too, if it hadn't been for something I saw yesterday about the publishing for the game in Europe changing hands in June. Best to avoid that, I thought, so I went with the recommendation.

Next it was into the world itself. It's very pretty. Really nice to look at. I'd have taken quite a few screenshots if I could have found a way to switch the UI off. I spent a while going through every option in setttings but if there is one, I couldn't find it. Black mark for that.

Absolutely everything that happened after that was instantly recognizable from games I'd played before. I mean all of it. Here's what I can remember, in sequence, from about an hour ago. 

Even looks like the town in Dragon Nest.

• Arrive just outside some small town
• Get met by some perky little girl in big pants, who's been expecting you
• Get taken into town to meet the person in charge, who turns out to be a bit of a jerk
• Have your authority and suitability for the job questioned but then get sent to do it anyway
• Naturally, the job involves going down a mine and killing some baddies
  
• Go down the mine, kill some baddies
• Run into some big guy having trouble with more baddies
• Rescue him
• Bring him back
• Discover he was trying to rescue his daughter
• Agree to go find her 
• And some more missing miners
• Go back down the mine and defend Big Pants Girl while she fixes some tech thing.
• Kill a lot more baddies including a couple of bosses
  
• Find a clue to the missing daughter
  
• Come back and tell her dad....

... and on it goes like that. We've all been there. Lots of times. 

And guess what? It works! I had a good time. A very disposable, meaningless good time but so is eating ice-cream and we don't trash that for lack of originality, do we? Well I don't. I love ice-cream.

There were a couple of things that stood out. Little wrinkles I don't remember seeing before and that I thought were good and that suggested this game had been put together by people with both a sense of humor and some pride in their work. 

One was the explanation for why I hadn't even been asked to name my character in "Character Creation". 

That's because the way you prove your fitness for the job to the jerk I mentioned earlier is to whip out your employment papers from the Adventurers Guild and stuff them under his nose. And in order to make the quest move on, you have to sign them at the bottom with the name you're giving your character.

I thought that was neat. Also, I really liked the way there's no actual instruction on what to do. You just have to figure it out from context. It felt very... organic.

So did the other bit I liked, which is where an advertising droid calls out to you, trying to sell you something and when you tell it you aren't interested it turns out what it was trying to sell you is  membership to the same Adventurers Guild you're already in, so it changes tack and tries to sell you on the benefits instead. It's a very clever way to slip in a bit of tutorial without it seeming too obvious and once again it felt very... organic. I'd say immersive but maybe that would be over-stating it.

This isn't bad translation. It's the writers parodying bad translation.
Made me laugh, anyway.

This might be the time to mention the translation. It's excellent. Flawless, in fact. Demotic, naturalistic English throughout, albeit with a slightly 1950s television western tinge to it in places. I think someone might have said "darn tooting" once. Or something like that.

Voice acting is minimal but fine when it occurs. I was a little taken aback when my character spoke. She didn't do it much. It certainly didn't have the impact of when that happens in Wuthering Waves but then then comparing the two games is like comparing Hanna Barbera to Studio Ghibli.

One odd thing I particularly want to mention: when I say Crystal of Atlan reminds me of lots of games I've played, that's true, but it really reminds me of one specific game - Dragon Nest. 

Firstly, CoA uses exactly the same structure as Dragon Nest. There's a hub in which all players mingle, making it an MMO of sorts, but all you do there is get missions that take you into instances. So far, so generic. There's a map showing the instances strung out in a line that you have to follow like a trail, completing each and returning to the hub for the next mission before you can move on to the next. Dragon Nest also has one of those.

Once was enough, thanks. Also, what the hell is going on with your pants?

Where I really started to get Dragon Nest vibes, though, was inside the instances. They look similar and they're set up the same way, with a linear path that goes through several stages that require zoning. In each, faceless swarms of mobs need to be dispatched before you reach a mini-boss. The mini-bosses even have the same kind of A/B/C/D difficulty ratings as they do in Dragon Nest and the fights feel very similar.

You can optionally repeat each dungeon to earn loot or xp or points or you can choose to continue to the next one. Dragon Nest had a similar mechanic. None of this is in any way conclusive, of course, but I've played a lot of these games and this one really reminded me of that one in particular.

Where's me hat?!

And then I met that guy who needed rescuing and he was a smith with a huge beard and he used to be a big deal and in Dragon Nest there's a guy who looks a lot like him and is also famous only he's a dirigible engineer. And then I had to rescue the smith's young daughter who'd gone into the mines and the guy in Dragon Nest has a young son who... You get the idea.

I think it all just comes down the developers pulling from the same set of tropes and using the same off-the-shelf mechanics but Dragon Nest was where I saw a lot of them first so that's where I know them from. I ought to play Dragon Nest again... It's a great game.

As I worked my way through the missions, I got plenty of xp and leveled up fast. I also got plenty of gear, which the game told me to equip, so I did. 

That was very disappointing. Not because the gear was no good - it was fine. It was disappointing because the little icons made it seem like it was going to look great when I put it on but absolutely none of it displayed at all.

I went from wearing what you see above to... what you see above.  At one point my paper doll said I was in full plate armor but as far as anyone could see I was still in the shirt, bustier and green jacket. As for the flying helmet with the goggles and the jaunty feather? Must be invisible.

None of that is remotely surprising in a game that claims not to have gacha mechanics for anything that matters but that does have them for Outfits. I just hope that, like Noah's Heart, there are at least some alternative ways of changing your look. I did spot one in the Pre-registration freebies, which I got even though I never pre-registered for the game. I need to be Level 15 to use it though so I haven't tried it to see how it works.

In Dragon Nest he was an airship engineer and he had a son, not a daughter,
but I swear it's the same guy...

And that pretty much covers it. I suppose I should say something about the combat but at these early levels it's one hundred per cent button-mashing as far as I'm concerned so I don't have much insight there. Button-mashing does the job though and I haven't died yet or needed to use a health potion if that tells you anything. Oh, and there's a dodge mechanic that actually works really well and feels very comfortable, so that's a big plus.

Another big plus is the option to have the mouse cursor available at all times. It's not promoted. It's buried in the settings somewhere. I only found it because I was in there looking for a way to switch off the UI. 

CoA is a very much an action-rpg  and a pretty slick one and these days I can play games like that with a surprising amount of facility, so I no longer miss my old hot bars the way I once did. It's nice to have the option all the same and I very much do like being able to click on UI elements at will, without having to hold down a key at the same time. All action games should offer that choice.

And that's about it for now, I think. Overall, my first impressions are quite positive. The game doesn't have an ounce of originality but it does have plenty of visual flair, it's well-translated and it's slick as you like. Everything works perfectly, no glitches or bugs that I saw. And most importantly, it's fun. 

If I was short of ways to fill my time, I'd be happy to fill a few hours with this. The problem, if that's what to call it, is that this kind of seemingly effortless professionalism makes the all those more interesting and original games we'd rather be playing look even worse when they flop pathetically in Early Access, unfinished, full of bugs and barely any fun at all.

Exactly why is that, I wonder? It surely can't just be money, can it? 

Dragons, Ponies, Bunnies And Sheep

Immediately after I posted about Dragon Nest 2: Evolution yesterday, I logged in and played for a couple of hours. When I logged out I was level 10 and I had a pony. 

I'd love to show you how cool I looked riding it but although I took some great snapshots I still can't find them. After spending the best part of an hour looking, including a full search of my hard drive by date and file extension, I have to conclude that's because they don't exist.

Luckily, I have a workaround. Two, in fact. I can take screenshots using the excellent Windows 10 Screenshot function, something I do more and more these days, since I finally discovered it existed a few weeks ago. Or I can use Bluestacks own screen saving service.

Why don't I do that now and then we can have a nice picture of a horsie!

Isn't he adorable? He's even better when you can see him stamping and shaking his head. He's called Macha. Or maybe she is? Probably a girl-horse.

Doesn't really matter because I won't be riding him/her any more. Now I'm riding a sheep. Want to see her? Of course you do.

The more observant reader might also notice my character's dressed differently in that last shot. Oh, a lot happened while I was logged in taking those screenshots, let me tell you! For one thing, I got some...

Bunny Ears!

Bunny ears that turn you blonde, no less. It's only fitting.

The bunny ears came from a chest I got that I think was either from the current holiday event - because of course there's already a holiday going on even though the game only started a week ago - or it was a reward for the game going Live. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a Log-In reward because those were mostly coin and gems to spend in some shop I haven't even looked at yet.

 

The sheep, which is actually called Angelic Sheep - it has a halo! - also came out of some chest or other. Judging by the congratulatory message, maybe it was a lucky win. I only saw one other person riding one but then again I am a week late getting started so probably everyone else is on griffins or pegasi by now. 

My sheep is quite charming, don't you think? Yes, well, you should because she is charming and I can prove it.

See? She has a Charm modifier. My pony doesn't.

She's also faster than the pony so you know who's going to win and I don't just mean in a race. I have no idea what riding a charming mount does for you in this game but I'm betting it's better than not riding one. I mean than riding one that's not. Oh, you know what I mean.

As for the new outfit, I bet you can't guess how I got that. Go on. Try. You won't guess.

I fought a dragon for it! Yes, that dragon. A big, red one breathing fire and everything!

I want to say I killed a dragon but I'm not actually sure what happened. It was a quest that popped up at level 10 to "Change" my class. I wasn't sure I wanted to change my class but I was curious so I clicked on it and it took me into an instance where I had to fight that thing.

It was one of those fights where the boss has umpteen defensive layers you have to peel off so it felt like I'd already killed him three or four times when he finally flew off. I was so low on health by then I thought he'd killed me and I'd lost but when I exited the instance it turned out I'd done whatever it was I was supposed to do. 

Probably just prove I was dumb enough to try and solo a red dragon, I guess.

I found out what "Change Class" meant when I did the hand-in. It means pick your sub-class. Or advanced class. Or whatever. 

My inclination was to take the ranged option, Bowmaster, but then I looked at those helpful diagrams at the bottom and decided that given the way I'm approaching combat, Ranger would be the better option for me. 

When I started, I tried to play my Archer the way I imagined a ranged DPS ought to be played solo. I stood back, picked targets, kited and tried to stay out of melee range as much as possible. That worked fine in a couple of instances but then at around level 5 I hit a quest instance I couldn't finish. 

I kept dying almost as soon as I engaged the final boss. At first I figured he was too strong and/or he had some kind of one-shot ability I was failing to avoid but after a few runs, while I was going very carefully and slowly, trying to figure things out, I got "one-shotted" before I even got to the boss - after I'd killed all the mobs.

It was then that I figured out what I was doing wrong. The instance had a timer I hadn't even noticed. You had to complete the whole thing in under three and a half minutes or the instance closed and kicked you out. That's what had been happening to me every time.

Clearly I needed to go faster. Careful pulling was too slow. So I changed tactics one-eighty. Instead of backpedalling and plinking away with my bow as the mobs chased me, I ran straight at them and stopped in melee range. Then, instead of carefully selecting each of my attacks, I just rippled my fingers as fast as possible across keys 1-4 like I was playing a keyboard trill.

And guess what? It worked. I finished the whole instance, boss included, with a minute to spare. I didn't even take all that much damage. Since then, that's been my go-to combat style. Absolutely no skill or thought required. I can't imagine it's going to work for long but it's gotten me to Level 10 and it beat that dragon so I'm sticking with it until it stops working.

It also got me a parade through the city of Saint Haven complete with cheering crowds and a fanfare from iconic NPC Irine. I've had similar experiences in a few MMORPGs over the years but this was one of the better ones. It gave me feels, I'm not gonna lie.

It's nice to get this kind of thing at the start of the game, too, rather than having to wait until your all cynical and jaded after weeks of grinding. Not that I'm going to be doing any of that. Much though I love Dragon Nest in all its myriad forms, I don't think of it as any kind of "forever game". A Forever Franchise, maybe.

Even if I was minded to settle down in Altea (That's the name of the world where Dragon Nest is set.) it wouldn't be a good idea to become too fond of any one iteration. They open and close like California poppies (If that's botanically inaccurate you can blame Bard. I didn't cross-reference it.) A previous attempt at a mobile MMORPG version of the game, World of Dragon Nest, barely lasted a year and the way the ratings for this one are going (Down to 1.9 today.) I wouldn't bet on it lasting even that long.

Which would be a shame because it's a lot of fun, at least at the beginning. How long it'll stay fun I wouldn't care to say, although comments I've read about the necessity to find groups or even raids to complete basic main quest instances don't bode well.

For now, though, I'm happy to keep mashing buttons and picking up prizes. We'll see how long that lasts, I guess. If nothing else, it makes a change from doing the same thing in Noah's Heart.

You Can't Keep A Good Dragon Down

In the extremely unlikely event someone were to ask me if a particular new game from SquareEnix had been released yet, in theory I'd be able to tell them immediately, even though I haven't played an SE game in a long while. That's because Square delight in bombarding me with information about every last little thing they do. 

In practice, of course, I never read any of their press releases or bother to remember any of the names so I wouldn't be able to help anyone out on the latest Final Fantasy game or whatever it might be.  I have next to no interest in anything Square Enix is ever likely to produce.

I find it almost painfully ironic, then, that I didn't find out about the launch of a game I would have loved to have known about until I read about it at MassivelyOP almost a week after said game went live. I should make it clear, I'm not complaining about MOP's tardiness. At least they got around to covering the launch eventually. The other MMO-specific news site I follow, MMOBomb, still hasn't seen fit to mention the game at all.

The game in question, as you'll already have gathered from the picture at the top of the post, is Dragon Nest 2: Evolution. Anyone who's been around this blog for a while will have heard me mention Dragon Nest a number of times. It's one of my favorite MMORPG franchises and one I've been playing on and off - mostly off - for many years. 

The last time I posted about Dragon Nest was a couple of years ago, when I helpfully recapped my history with the game, saving me the trouble of having to do it again now. I will just re-iterate the surprising - even to me - fact that I've been playing various versions of Dragon Nest for longer than this blog has existed.

Next time I do a recap like that I'm going to have to add another chapter. Dragon Nest, despite having barely been mentioned by any MMO news outlet I've ever read, let alone by any other bloggers in this part of the blog forest, is a pretty big deal in some parts of the world. There have been many iterations of the IP on both PC and mobile. There are often multiple versions running simultaneously in different regions. Dragon Nest is very much A Thing.

The MOP news story reports that the newest addition to the stable collected more than three million pre-registrations of which I would have been one if I'd know there was anything to pre-register for. I'm aware these big numbers can sound specious but I did some research on the worldwide popularity of Dragon Nest a few years back and all the data I was able to find spoke to a global audience measured in millions. The current iteration is even tagged as a "Global" release so I find this new figure convincingly consistent.

Naturally, as soon as I found out what I was missing, I moved to remedy my loss. There's a satisfying degree of synchronicity here in that Dragon Nest 2: Evolution is a mobile-only title that my Kindle would probably burst into flames if it had to try to run so it's incredibly good timing that it happens to have launched just as I've been updating my Mobile-On-PC capabilities.

First, I had to choose a platform. I discounted Google Play Games immediately on the grounds I'd already checked to see if I could play any of the earlier Dragon Nests there and come up blank. I've just done a due dilligence check to see if DN2:E might have been added to the GPG roster in the last few days; it hasn't.

My next choice was Bluestacks 5, where I was delighted to find the game right away. Unfortunately, when I installed it and pressed "Play", I got the introductory movie followed by a swift return to the game selection screen. 

Rather than fiddle around with that, I tried Nox. The current version of Nox has a horrible search function that seems to do nothing more than open a web browser. When you search for a game, most of the top results are for third-party websites that offer to install the game for you. Yeah, right. Nope.

I found the genuine Google Play link and used that but all I got was the dreaded "This phone isn't compatible with this app." Fortunately, I still wasn't out of options. 

When I was tinkering with Bluestacks the other day, trying to get Sky: Children of Light to run (Still no joy there...) I set up a couple of variants, each of which appears to register as a different "phone". I tried another and this time... 

It still didn't work. But that turned out to be because I'd refused to allow the game access to my photographs. 

I know. Why? Apparently you have to, though, if you want to play. I did want to play that much so I started over. Fine, you can look through all my pictures of Beryl if you really feel you must. Then is everything cool?

It was. I was in.

Since I hadn't even discovered Dragon Nest 2 : Evolution existed until about five minutes before I was about to close down the PC for the night and since getting it up and running had taken me about half an hour, there wasn't really time for me to log in, make a character and take a look around. 

So I logged in, made a character and took a look around.

Of course I did. It's Dragon Nest!

I'll most likely do a proper First Impressions piece at some point but for now I'll just bang out a few bullet points:

• Classes: There are only four: Warrior, Archer, Sorceror and Cleric. I picked Archer because for some reason I almost always pick someone with a bow and then almost always wish I hadn't. And yet I never learn.
  

• Character Creation: Isn't bad, especially for a mobile game. There are a reasonable number of choices in hairstyle and eye-makeup and you can make your character's face look round or pointy. So long as you want your character to look like a seven-year-old playing dress-up you'll be very comfortable with the results - and if you don't, remind me why you're playing a Dragon Nest game again?
  

• Controls: The screen is covered with dots which is weird. There's one for every location where there's some kind of command or trigger. I'm guessing on a touch screen that's where you'd tap and you can indeed click the icons there with your mouse pointer when they appear. They also tell you which keyboard shortcut you can use. All of which is fine except why they need to be permanently visible beats me. If there's a way to turn them off I haven't found it yet but since my brain was already refusing to notice them after half an hour I imagine I'll just forget they're there altogether in a while. * See comments below - this is actually a Bluestacks option that can be changed or removed, not a feature of DN2:E.
  
  

• Aesthetics: Those dots are going to be the least of your problems when it comes to screen clutter. What is it about mobile games that makes designers want to cover every inch of the screen with pop-ups and windows and notices? How does anyone play these games on a five inch screen? Can you even see your character on a phone? That said, Dragon Nest 2: Evolution is better in that respect than Dragon Nest M was and it's almost minimalist by comparison with something like Black Desert Mobile, which I found totally overwhelming.
  

• Translation: The big surprise to me is the translation. It's good! I'm so used to having to pick my way through the quaint, charming, fractured English in search of anything approximating a meaning in all the other Dragon Nests I've played, it's almost shocking to be able to understand everything completely, first time. Better still, all the English text I've seen in the game isn't just technically correct - it's idiomatic and characterful too. It's a miracle!
  

• Voice Acting: Maybe the reason the translation is so much better than usual is that they were able to hire a genuine English speaker with the money they saved on not hiring any English-speaking voice actors. The game seems to be fully-voiced - at least the tutorial is, which is as far as I've got - but all of the actors are speaking Korean (I think... could be something else... I'm not entirely clear on who made the game, which is published by Tencent subsidiary, Level Infinite.) It's a compromise that works quite nicely for me. I've always been fine with subtitles.

• Selfies: There's one of those in-game photo features that I like so much. I took some great shots of my character. At least I think I did. Unfortunately, the game doesn't tell you what directory it's using and I haven't been able to find them. I looked in all the usual places but nothing so far. All the shots in this post were taken using Windows own screenshot function.
  

• Authenticity: The game really looks and feels like Dragon Nest. The character design is the same as always, the NPCs are all familiar names and the tutorial opens in Carderock. I recognised the starting town immediately. It looks much the same as it did in all the other Dragon Nests. 

I'd have looked around town and taken some selfies but before I could orient myself the tutorial shunted me off into an instance and then another and then I died so I thought it was probably time for bed.

DN2:E has a lowish rating on Google Play (2.6 out of 5 from more than half a million downlaods as I write this, up from 2.5 last night.) following a rocky start when some things kept falling over or didn't work at all. It looks like most of that's been fixed since and some of it seems to have been no more than the usual mmorpg launch issue of everyone trying to log in at the same time, anyway. It ran smoothly for me is all I can say. 

Reddit is even less happy, though, and for reasons that have nothing to do with launch day blues. The general consensus there seems to be that the whole thing's just a blatant cash grab based on re-using existing assets to exploit any remaining pockets of nostalgia that aren't already tapped out from all the other Dragon Nest cash-grabs there've been.

I can't say I disagree. I am absolutely not going to recommend DN2:E to anyone who hasn't already played other games in the series and even then only if, like me, it feels like it still hasn't been enough. If it wasn't for the nostalgia factor I wouldn't be bothering with it myself and even with those warm fuzzies, it's pretty unlikely I'll play this iteration for more than a few sessions. 

Like all the later versions, it's like a photocopy of a photocopy of the original, just enough fidelity left that you can picture what it's supposed to be if you squint hard enough. I'm happy they keep making new Dragon Nests because I always enjoy trying them out but the best one was the first one. That's the game I really miss. It's been a slow roll downhill ever since.

I'm just a Dragon Nest tourist at this point and happy to be one. Or I will be, when I can find my holiday snaps...

Look, Ma! Both Hands!

It's possible, although I don't really think it's likely, that you might remember me saying earlier this week, that I'd bought an XBox-style gamepad. Ostensibly it was because my swerve away from all-mmos-all-the-time to more of a mixed gaming economy had me running into more and more games that support keyboard and mouse grudgingly at best. That was my excuse, anyway, although the real reason was the Prime sale was on and I really wanted to buy something... anything... fun because it sometimes seems like all I ever buy on Amazon are necessities.

The game that prompted my purchase was Ikonei Island, which did indeed turn out to be even more enjoyable when played with a controller. Unfortunately, open beta ended the very next day, so I only got to play once, very briefly, using the superior control system. Grrr. Gnash.

Brevity aside, I enjoyed the experience so much I started looking around for other games to try with the pad. I was under the impression I had quite a few but once I started looking, I couldn't find any. Hardly surprising, really. Most of the games I've bought or played over the last year or two have been some variation of point&click adventure, walking simulator or visual novel, none of which seems especially suited to the controller, although I'm sure there are plenty that use it anyway.

As for my staple diet, mmorpgs, of late, I've rather fallen off that wagon. I think I must have played fewer hours per week these last few months than at any time since the turn of the millennium, although that has more to do with external factors (New dog plus extended run of great spring/summer weather.) than any loss of interest or affection for the genre.

Mmorpgs, being very much a PC genre by historical development, tend not to be optimized for or even playable with gamepads but there are some notable exceptions. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember what they were off the top of my head so I had to do a bit of googling.

Among many others, I came across this list, which looked good, even though I didn't find it all that helpful or indeed trustworthy, what with Tera (Closed down) and Valiance (Not yet up.) along with a few titles that aren't mmos at all, let alone mmorpgs, plus a bunch I'd never heard of (Steambirds Alliance, anyone? KurtzPel?) Still, it was somewhere to start.

I thought I'd make a shortlist of mmorpgs with controller support that I a) already know b) have played and enjoyed and c) still have installed. From the two dozen on the list, that left four - five if you include another from the concluding section, headed "Best MMORPG with Controller Support", in which they bizarrely boil the choice down to four games, two of which they haven't even bothered to include in the main part of the article.

The games I ended up with were

• DC Universe Online
• Dragon Nest
• Final Fantasy XIV
• Lost Ark
• Elder Scrolls Online

I also considered Final Fantasy XI, a game I once tried very hard to enjoy despite it having hands-down the worst mouse/keyboard controls of any game ever. I wasn't going to subscribe just to give the controller a test run, though, and sadly, even after all this time there is no free-to-play option, although it does have a fourteen-day free trial. 

AThere's another consideration. After more than a decade I'm still traumatised from my struggles with Square Enix's infamous PlayOnline registration process. I don't think I want to go through all that again just for an hour or two's play and a blog post. Never say never, though...

ArcheAge might be a possibility in that I liked it quite a bit but it also played really well with keyboard and mouse. Like any other mmorpg, in fact. There doesn't seem a lot of point in re-installing a game that almost certainly won't feel more enjoyable on a gamepad than if I just played it in the regular way. If I want to mess around with something like that, I think Guild Wars 2 has some kind of controller support.

Trove was another theoretical possibility but I never really got on with Trove. I can't say I want to try again. For the purposes of the experiment, five games ought to be plenty, anyway, and it's fair to say that, while I've enjoyed playing all of them, four out of the five do feel like they weren't originally intended to be played on PC. There's a reasonable chance my experience might be improved with a controller.

The exception would be FFXIV, which I always felt played immaculately with traditional PC controls, but I've heard that it's also the best-implemented of all mmorpgs when it comes to gamepad support. Comba did feel a little off, now I come to think of it.... That might well feel a little smoother and more natural with a gamepad. Worth a try, anyway.

DCUO is a game I've always loved despite the control system clearly being designed for consoles. I would have made it my first stop, only I couldn't remember where it was. I haven't played since my hard drives all swapped themselves around and the icon has gone from my desktop. Obviously I could have gone looking for it but all the rest were there, staring at me, so DCUO shuffled off to the back of the line. 

It'd be funny if you could understand it.

 

I began with Dragon Nest. Things did not go well. 

I may have mentioned before just how many versions of Dragon Nest there are. I have played more than half a dozen of them over the years, including the original (Just called Dragon Nest although maybe we should call it Dragon Nest Classic now), Dragon Nest EU, Dragon Nest Oracle, Dragon Nest Origins, Dragon Nest 2019 and Dragon Nest Worlds. 

I have all of those except Classic still installed although Worlds is actually the mobile title and it recently closed down (Wipe away those tears! There's a Dragon Nest Worlds 2 on the way.). The icon on my desktop turned out to be for Dragon Nest 2019, which in turn turned out to be what I'd named the foder for Dragon Nest NA.

DNNA has an excellent opening cut scene with barely comprehensible captions but what the game itself is like I can't tell you because once you get past that it's solidly IP blocked. As the website explains, they only have the USA, Canadian and Oceanic rights. 

The EU servers closed a while back, when whoever it was that had them lost the rights and no-one else wanted to take over. Still, I was fairly sure there was some UK-accessible iteration of Dragon Nest still out there and I was right: Dragon Nest Origins.

I got that patched up, which didn't take too long. My old login details worked and it was wonderful to reacquaint myself with my highest-level DN character, Dora. I'd forgotten how far I'd gotten with her. She's level 27 (Out of seventy, I think.)

I fiddled about looking for the controller options but when I found them they were horrifically complicated, to the point where I closed the window in terror. I was so shocked I didn't even think to take a screenshot. I'd log in and do it now but I can't because Zenimax won't let me. Explanation follows.

I tried using the controller without the instructions. Some things were intuitive - movement, speaking to NPCs, jumping... Others weren't - scrolling through lists, selecting options, turning around.... I'm going to have to take a proper look at the enormous list of commands before I try and do anything more challenging than walk around town but since I always found DN fairly comfortable to play with the regular PC controls, I can't really summon up the willpower just now.

Proof of Concept

On to the next, which for entirely arbitrary reasons, I decided should be ESO. Big mistake. 

I knew there'd be some updating to do. It's been a while since I last played. I started patching at around midday and the damn thing was still going until about twenty minutes ago. It's nearly half-past six! 

For some reason the patcher kept downloading massive multi-gigabyte files and installing them even though I already had over 70GB of files in the folder. When I eventually checked the size of the finished installation it wasn't much more than 10GB larger even though it seemed like ten times that had to have come down the pipe.

Not only that but for a couple of hours the patching, installing and verifying was so intense it made my entire PC come close to locking up. I couldn't do anything more taxing than look at phones on Amazon and even that was a struggle. 

Eventually I went to lunch, leaving the patcher running, hoping it would fniish while I was gone. I came back an hour and a half later, just in time to see the PC shut down and restart. Whether that was something demanded by the patching process or the poor thing had just given up and rolled over I couldn't tell.

Another couple of hours later and the PLAY button is finally ready to click. I suppose I'd better go give it a try. It's a lot of work for a game I don't even care for al that much but I've started so I guess I'll finish.

Whatever happens when I get in is going to have to wait for another post so I guess this is going to turn into a series whether I want it to or not. I hope the rest of the entries end up a lot more interesting than this one but I have a worrying feeling they won't. There's only so many ways you can say "I tried it but I didn't much like it and now I feel like I've wasted my day".

Put It In Books

Think back to when Warhammer: Age of Reckoning was set to become the biggest mmorpg the western market had ever seen. As well as Public Quests and bears that remembered who'd killed them (or something like that) one of the many innovations the game claimed to be bringing to the genre was a virtual book that would keep a record of everything you'd done.

I'm not at all sure the Tome of Knowledge would have been the first such in-game archive. Vanguard, for example, a game which launched a year and a half before WAR, had a wonderful feature that automatically recorded significant events like the first time you entered a new area or discovered a new item. The game took a screenshot when something it considered to be significant happened and fixed it neatly in a scrapbook you could open and enjoy whenever you wanted to look back on your journey so far. 

There may very well have been others before that but even if the Tome wasn't the first I don't think there's much doubt it was the most extensive. Had WAR gone on to be the WoW Killer so many hoped and believed it would be, we'd probably see vast encyclopedias dragging load times down to a crawl in every mmorpg.

 

Sadly, WAR's assault on Blizzard's bastion turned out to be something of a disaster. When the last Bright Wizard had fizzled out and the final goblin gone to meet the great Squig Herder in the sky, other developers quietly appropriated those few of WAR's innovations they could see a use for and left the rest to rot. No-one picked up the Tome.

Which is a shame. I really love in-game journals and albums. I can't see why they're so often relegated to minor sub-systems where few notice them, far less appreciate their many fine qualities.

It's different in single-player games, particularly those in the adventure or visual novel genres. There, where the audience is presumed to be predisposed to reading reams of text and staring fixedly at static images, all kinds of notebooks, albums and journals are the norm. 

Or they have been. I have noticed, of late, a regrettable tendency for such games to adopt a more contemporary solution: mobile phones, laptops, tablets and the like. It makes sense when the setting is a time roughly analagous to our own, of course, and in games set in the (inevitably dystopian and/or cyberpunk) future it would be perverse to have the protagonist record their findings in longhand.

In those games, the medium is less important than the message, anyway. Whatever the carrier device, the conceit is that the player-character is making a record of their thoughts, their theories and the clues and evidence they've uncovered. The journal may look beautiful but its primary function is practical, not aesthetic. 

Warhammer's Tome of Knowledge was intended to be highly functional as well as wonderfully decorative. The quest journal, a very specific sub-type of this kind of thing and one for which almost every rpg has to make some kind of accomodation, was, in WAR, merely one of the Tome's many  chapters. 

It's a long time since I played WAR. I can't remember whether I found the Tome a marvelous compendium of wonders or a bloody nuisance. I seem to recall it might have been a bit of both. Over the past couple of weeks, though, I've stumbled across several much less ambitious efforts that I've found wholly delightful.

The Overseer systems in both EverQuest and EverQuest II include something not dissimilar to a virtual cabinet of collectible cards. I spotted the feature in EQ right at the start but it's taken me more than a year to notice the Agent Collection tab in EQII. Or, perhaps I should say, I noticed it long before that but only recently did it occur to me to click on it to see what was in there.

Inside I found nothing I hadn't seen before. Just the same pictures of the agents and the same descriptive text. The difference is purely one of magnitude: the functional icons are almost too small to make out and the tool-tip versions aren't all that much bigger but in the Agent Collection tab they're huge. And they look great.

I love illustration. I was thinking about it after I posted about Scarlet Hollow yesterday. I was wondering just why it is I enjoy games of that kind so much, even when the story might not be anything I haven't read before and the gameplay might be routine (Scarlet Hollow, I should make clear, is both well-written and fun to play). 

The answer is very simple: it's the pictures. It hadn't really struck me before but I genuinely do have a sensual reaction to line illustration that's akin to those I get from eating or drinking or listening to music. It's an almost synesthetic reaction. I can almost, in some indefinable way, feel the textures. 

Or it feels like I can feel them. I'm not a genuine synesthete. I don't see colors when I hear sounds or taste flavors when I touch surfaces. All the same, line art does something to my brain that has an effect analogous to ASMR.

Come to think of it, perhaps it is ASMR. It's easy to forget that phenomenon extends to visual as well as auditory stimuli. Regular ASMR videos and recordings do work on me but not as strongly as they reportedly do on others. 

The sensations I get from line art are milder but unmistakable. Wikipedia describes it as ""the subjective experience of "low-grade euphoria" characterized by "a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin"". I don't often get the tingling just from looking at line art but it has happened. The low-grade euphoria, though, that I get often.

By no means all in-game albums produce those kind of effects. It's a bonus if they do. I don't need a quasi-synaesthetic reaction to enjoy them. I almost always enjoy them.

Dragon Nest Origins uses an album to record the way NPCs feel about the player-character. It's a faction list. It could just be a column of names and numbers, the way it is in so many other games with reputation systems. But it isn't.

Someone took the trouble not just to frame a little portrait of every character you can bribe or flatter into liking you but to work up a whole lot of personal details about each of them. Not the kind of details you might expect to find in a game, like their stats or skills. Nothing so mundane.

I think these will turn to color when you reach a certain percentage of favor.

 

Or, perhaps I ought to say, something much more mundane. Deliciously so. Their age, star sign, weight, height and, most bizarrely of all, blood type. Has any other mmorpg ever made a point of revealing an NPC's blood type? I very much doubt it.

As well as the basic facts of life there are entries for Likes and Dislikes that wouldn't look out of place in a 1970s teen magazine. Lady Kayleen likes "The color red, tangy fragrances" and dislikes "Clerics, dragon followers, annoyances". Don't you feel like you know her, now?

 

It seems to me these kind of albums and journals could easily be spun up into something a lot more central, even integral. to gameplay. I'd be far more likely to devote time and effort to the countless collections and achievements that most mmorpgs pump out as a cheap form of content if I could browse my the results in a heavily-illustrated catalog, preferably with extensive curatorial notes.

And how about pets and mounts? Couldn't they all come with breeding histories and certificates and, of course, portraits? There's a long, rich history of animal portraiture, after all. We already get lists of all these things, sometimes with thumbnails. All it would take is some thought to turn them into virtual keepsakes or even minor works of art.

I wonder if this is the sort of thing Raph Koster has in mind when he talks of "Supporting a range of ways to play." If so, I wish he'd get on and make a game. Unfortunately, I doubt a plethora of gorgeously designed and lavishly illustrated virtual scrapbooks is what he has in mind.

It's what I'd like, though. I just don't expect to get it.

Who Invented These Lists?

 

Here's what I've been playing this week:

Guild Wars 2 - Every day, two accounts, dailies, World vs World, occasional PvE.

EverQuest II - Every day, one account, Overseer dailies, inventory maintenance, some PvE.

EverQuest - Every day, one account plus another trading offline, Overseer dailies, restocking.

Valheim - Most days, tailing off towards the end of the week, exploring, hunting goblins.

Dragon Nest Origins- Most days, leading to every day towards the end of the week, leveling up, trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing and how the game works.

DCUO - One day, checking out new episode, grabbing the freebies, some PvE, playing with my pets.

Occupy White Walls - One day, checking out new update, adding music to my gallery.

Try not to hit the window.

I have a list as long as Plastic Man's arm of games I'm thinking of playing. Or Mr. Fantastic's. Or Elongated Man's. Or even Stretch Armstrong's, I guess. Weird how many times that gimmick's been used considering how peculiar it is. Did any kid ever have fantasies about being able to make their limbs fifty yards long? I mean before they saw it in a comic book? Flying, super strength, invisibility - sure. Stretchiness? I doubt it. 

There's a dysfunctional tradition on this blog where I post lists of games I say I want to be playing or at least that I have some vague idea I might play. I think this might be one of those posts. 

It wasn't going to be. It was going to be all about Dragon Nest Origins but as I was sketching it out in my head I got this nagging feeling a lot of what I was about to say had been said already. By me. On this blog. 

So I took a moment to go back and read all my previous posts about the various versions of Dragon Nest and damned if I wasn't right. See that picture of Dora, right up at the top? I took that yesterday because I was going to say something about how she'd gotten her first costume and how I wasn't convinced it was much of a look. 

Turns out I said that five years ago, the first time she got it. Another Dora, that is. Although it's the same Dora, really. (Is this the metaphysics classroom or is that down the hall?). I could link to the post but what's the point? Just click on the tag for Dragon Nest if you're interested. I'm sure you can find it.

Any chance whoever translated this quest could do all the others?

 

On the subject of the many iterations of Dragon Nest... geez! I had no idea. Or, apparently, I did, because I linked to the wikipedia page in one of those old posts. I even made a sarcastic comment about how comprehensive it was. I looked at it again today. There have been (at least)

• Four iterations of the base game (Dragon Nest; Dragon Nest 2.0.; Dragon Nest R; Dragon Nest A: Will of the Gods).
• Seven regional variations, all somewhat different.
• Nine spin-off titles, mostly mobile games.
• Two manga spin-off series.
• Five commercially-released singles featuring songs either from or about the game.
• A "drama CD" (I think that's an audio book?).
• Two full-length animated movies (You can watch the whole of the first one here).

That sounds insane until you realize that, in 2013, Dragon Nest had two hundred million players. And I talk about it as if it's some cute little indie game! 

After that, I thought twice about the post I was going to write. I had some nice screenshots of quest text all ready to illustrate the wildly varying quality of translation in the game only I already did that years ago. I was going to make some comments about how I'd just about caught up to where I was last time I played only a) I already did that years ago, too and b) now I've reviewed my posting history on Dragon Nest, I realize I still have some way to go before I get back to my all-time high-water mark.

It seems I did once manage to help Hubert repair his airship. I have been to the big city, Saint's Haven. I even had a farm, once. None of which I can do right now. Dora's done all Hubert's quests and his airship is still grounded. She's level twenty-four, which is when the Saint's Haven questlines begin, but she has no way of getting there and untilshe does she can't go to the farm, even though the game tells her she should.

Not much point pretending I'm all caught up, then. I clearly have some more work to do. That's fine. I'm enjoying it. I am determined to get farther this time than in any of my previous runs. Providing the server stays up, that is. 

I do have something to say about Dragon Nest that I haven't written about before but I think I'll save it. It needs some working up with stuff from other games and I'm still letting it percolate. This picture's a clue :

Pretty sure that's someone's bio from their EQ character page c. 2001.

 

So here we are with another of those list posts about games I'm playing and games I might play. I do them because I like lists. Let's not pretend otherwise. I was even going to get all meta and do a whole post about lists and how suprisingly few of them turn up on mmo blogs considering what a staple of a) the internet and b) nerd culture they are. 

Is it okay to say "nerd culture"? I mean, it's linguistic reappropriation, isn't it? Which would make it fine when used by members of the formerly-oppressed group. Except I never really was a nerd (yes, I'm aware I might be one now...). 

We didn't really have nerds when I was growing up, or we didn't call them that (or geeks or any of the other hyper-Americanized terms that now have global currency). There were plenty of individuals who didn't fit in and got a hard time for it but there wasn't the same configuration of signatures and signs that would suggest any kind of unifying "culture" into which they might fit. 

Looking back, I seem to tick any number of the boxes but my boxes don't seem to have been in the same order or even the same warehouse. I think the particular subset of weirdos I hung with from the late '70s through the mid-90s was altogether too boisterous, loud and arrogant to feel oppressed by pretty much anyone. I'd sure have hated to have to have spent any time in a confined space with us. Not to mention nearly everyone was over six foot tall... I always felt short and I'm five-eleven. Or I was. I've shrunk a lot since then, of course.

I had a lot of ideas for that one (the meta-post about lists), ranging from my personal experience in APAs, where list-making was so predominant at one time there had to be rules about whether or not it counted as minac, to the much-maligned listicles used by commercial websites like Buzzfeed. I was going to extrapolate a thesis whereby the once-exclusive format had been devalued and degraded by abrasion with the mainstream. It was going to be very erudite and insightful but I couldn't be bothered to finish it. It's so much easier just to bang out a list.

Minac? Oh, that's "minimum activity". Since APAs generally had a maximum number of participants and there was often a waitlist, you were required to meet certain basic levels of engagement or you'd be kicked out. Kind of like Blaugust only with tasers. 

Take that, Lord Doljonijiarnimorinar!

 

Anyway, to the list. Well, the next one. These are the games I'm thinking about playing:

Disco Elysium - I accidentally updated it to the final version and the patch notes try to sell it as almost a new game. People said it was supposed to be highly re-playable even before that so maybe...

World of Warcraft - I did all the prep so I could go on playing after I let my sub lapse and then the moment I stopped paying I stopped playing.

Neo Cab - There must be more than half of this one I haven't seen and it should be possible to play it through again with virtually no duplication of content whatsoever. And it's great.

Genshin Impact - Couldn't even tell you why I stopped playing this one. The GI screenshot folder is still my slideshow for desktop backgrounds.

Elder Scrolls Online - I went back and posted about how much I was enjoying it and then I stopped. I guess I just don't enjoy enjoying myself.

Blade and Soul - See ESO.

Neverwinter Online - See Blade and Soul. 

Star Wars: the Old Republic - See NWO only add a couple of years.

FFXIV (free version) - I think you get the picture...

My Time At Portia - I ought to try and finish it before the beta for My Time At Sandrock arrives.

Yonder - It's like My Time At Portia only even prettier.

Rift - I like Rift. It's pointless to play it but I enjoy it when I do. I could practise that enjoyment thing I was talking about in a risk-free environment.

Why won't it fly?

 

That'll do for now. If I played that lot I'd never have time to eat or sleep. Or work. Not that I'm doing much of that right now.

Of course, if I didn't feel the need to come up with a couple of thousand words of this nonsense every day I'd have time to play at least a few of them. But I'd rather do this.

Self-evidently.