Property Liable To Flooding. Danger Of Turtles. Would Suit Adventurer Or Similar.

Yesterday's post started out as a double-feature - games I'm currently playing, co-starring EverQuest II and Once Human - but I ran on at such length about EQII I decided to cut Once Human out of the edit altogether. Just as well, really. I didn't have much to say about it.

I do have some screenshots, though. I take a lot of pictures in OH. It begs for it, what with all the gorgeous scenery and the plethora of odd and interesting details. Also, the in-game camera options are fairly easy to use and give very good results, which encourages scrapbooking if not actual photo-journalism.

The reason I don't have much to say about the game itslef, despite having played it a bunch of times recently, is only partly because I'm going through the same old content I've been through and written about several times already. Mainly it's because I've been spending most of my time building my house.

Once Human has excellent housing options although in common with far too many games they don't really begin to show their best side until you've invested a ton of points going down the various branches of the skill tree. That's not what it's called, by the way, but I'm not going to log in just to check the vernacular. We all know how these things work; no-one cares what the labels say.

Because you have to have done a lot of other, unrelated things to earn the points to spend on better materials and architectural features, there's an annoying tendency for all low-level housing to look like prefabricated boxes. I seem to recall this used to be called "ranch-style". That's if people even bother to put a roof on, of course. All too many players just slap down the foundations, place the utilities and leave it at that.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had my house on a small plateau overlooking one of the starter towns, a location that was attractive enough to acquire several message markers from players suggesting it was a great spot to build a starter home. 

Once Human has an odd - I want to say unique because I can't recall seeing it anywhere before - feature, whereby you can craft a glowing spike to stick in the ground just about anywhere. Then you can append a message, saying anything you want. There seem to be very few restrictions on placing these; you can put them on other people's property or in towns, for example. You see them pretty much everywhere although not any longer in the ludicrous profusion of the weeks following launch, I'm pleased to say.

Initially I found them very annoying. They seemed like nothing but visual pollution and if you took the trouble to click on them and read what people had written they usually turned out to be verbal pollution as well. Most of them wouldn't even qualify as tagging. They didn't even have that much style. 

In my initial run, having been infuriated to find someone had placed one of the damn things inside my house, I searched through the settings until I found the option to switch them off completely. After that, for a long time, I never saw them at all and was very glad of it.

Sometime later, though, probably after I re-started in a new Scenario, I began seeing them again and for some reason I didn't immediately switch them off. Instead, I read a few and found that as the game had matured, so had the players. Some of them, anyway. They were leaving very helpful details on things like where to find gear chests or what strategies to use on instance bosses. The messages can include images and hyperlinks so some of them amounted to full strategy guides inside the game. 

Consequently, I didn't switch the feature off again and now I quite enjoy clicking on the little glowing sticks to see what stories they can tell. I was pleased to read all those confirmations of what a good spot I'd picked but puzzled as to why no-one had followed their own advice and built a home there. Didn't take me long to find out.

Although the site is extremely favorably placed for facilities and views, it's also altogether too close to a "stronghold", a term that seems to mean just about any permanent structure currently infested with deviants. There's a small, unnamed camp of them at the far end of the plateau - completely harmless, decent neighbors, keep themselves to themselves, always ready to lend a cup of sugar provided you put a couple of bullets into them before you ask, that sort of thing - but the mere presence of the buildings they occupy hinders development in that direction and completely prevents expansion.

I found that out when I spent the necessary points to expand my territory only to find the machine wouldn't pony up the extra floor space. As it happened, I'd just received the nod to move on to the third town, Meyer's Market, so I figured I might as well move my whole operation down there.

You can just pick up your entire house with all the fittings, pop it in your bags and flip it out again where you want it to be. I thought about doing that but my house, if you could even call it that, was a mess so I thought it might be better if I just started again from scratch. Building in Once Human is both easy and fun so I was looking forward to it.

And it went really well. I found an excellent spot, also recommended by a previous resident, completely flat, on a large sandbank in the river next to the town. I put down my terminal, claimed the jumbo-sized plot.and started building. At the start pretty much all you need is to build is wood and gravel and there was no shortage of nodes for those right outside, so I started mining and chopping until I couldn't carry any more and then I turned to building.

After two or three sessions doing not much else I had the biggest, most sensibly laid-out house I've had in the game to date. It still looks like a box but it's a well-proportioned box with big, open rooms and high ceilings with plenty of light coming in through the numerous windows and skylights. It isn't much to look at from the outside but the interior has huge potential. I'm very happy with how it's going so far.

I'm not so happy with all the snapping turtles that keep wandering in from the river. They're no threat but they're highly aggressive and when one attacks it makes my character jump back about a yard, which in turn sometimes makes me jump, if I'm not expecting it. I may have to build a fence all around the property to keep them out.

I was enjoying building so much, I went out and did a bunch of missions to level up and get more points to spend in the housing tree. I could now build a much more impressive-looking structure in  stone instead of wood but that would mean going to higher-level areas to mine resources and doing more missions to get more points to open up the recipes for more sophisticated equipment...

And that's how they get you. Not that I'm complaining. It's very entertaining. The only shadow of doubt I have about carrying on down this path is whether the Novice server I'm on is eligible for permanent status, when the current scenario ends. I'm not at all sure the starter servers are included in that program.

And anyway, I want to set up my forever home in the game on one of the servers that has the full map open all the time, north and south. That's going to necessitate a move at some point so there's probably not much point my getting too invested in the server I'm on.

That's what I've been up to in Once Human. I said it wasn't anything new. But it's been a lot of fun. Sometimes more of the same is just what I want.

Defiance Gets A Second Chance To Make A First Impression

Here's my second and most likely last post about Defiance. I doubt it's going to be very long. I don't think I have much to say.

I have played it again, just the once, since last time I wrote about it. It's unfortunate that, as someone who isn't all that interested, I've had no more problems getting onto the servers, when apparently thousands of people who'd really like to play can't get in, but that's life.

I spent maybe an hour, perhaps a little longer, in the game a couple of evenings ago. Having heard from Tyler Edwards in the comments to my last post that there was only one zone - stretch a point and call it two - and that it was all going to look pretty much the same, I can't honestly say I was looking forward to another session but I thought it was a bit early to write the whole thing off as a bad idea. 

Writing a blog does sometimes have the awkward side effect of making me feel like I have some sort of nebulous, ill-defined "duty", either to an equally vague and largely imaginary "readership" or, worse, to the Spirit of Blogging itself. I feel like I have to make more of an effort to penetrate the surface even of games I don't like and don't intend to keep playing than I'd ever be likely to make if I was only interested in playing them for my own amusement.

I ought at this point to make it clear that I don't think Defiance is a bad game. I don't even think it's not fun. It seems like a pretty solid shooter with a neat line in large-scale, hot-join open world events. In that respect, it feels a lot like its Trion stablemate, Rift. It just do much for me.

The environmental graphics, about which I was complaining in the previous post, turned out not to be as bad as I first thought. In that respect, it's highly significant that my first session took place almost entirely at night whereas the second was all in the daytime. The whole place looked more appealing with some sun on it, which is perhaps the most realistic aspect of the entire game.

This might be the first game I've played where bullets make splashes in the water as people try to shoot you.

The gameplay was fine, too. Very straightforward at the extremely low levels I experienced. A lot of missions with clear instructions and map markers. Mostly "Go here, do this, come back", which is just about within my capabilities.

I thought it was nice that you get given a vehicle at a very early stage, although if there's any explanation of how you can summon and dismiss it at a click of a button I must have missed it. The game in general seems quite keen to oil the wheels in such small ways, not worried about sacrificing realism for convenience. 

I never ran out of ammunition, for example, not least because there are handy stores of the stuff all over the place that require no authority or credentials to access. Just click and fill and its all free. Not that ammo management and conservation seemed to play a great part in the game at the level I was playing. I saw prompts to "Reload" my weapons quite frequently and yet I seemed to be able to carry on shooting whether I paid any attention to them or not.

All of which is fine and yet the lack of friction somehow still never made the combat feel much like fun. I don't believe it's because I'm unfamiliar with genre or bad it at it, although I certainly am that latter . I seem to have played quite a few third-person shooters in the last few years (First person too, for that matter) and much to my own surprise, even though I suck at both, I generally have a pretty good time.

It's more that I found this particular example somewhat clunky compared to the rest. The comparisons I kept finding myself making as I played certainly didn't help, especially when I got to thinking about how much better Once Human handles just about every aspect. 

Everything in Defiance felt more awkward, required more forethought and took me more out of the moment. Nothing felt anywhere close to being natural or intuitive. It was hard work at times.

Having to pay so much attention to the mechanics just to get even the simplest things done was off-putting but the whole texture of the gameplay was roughened by the game seemingly not wanting to give me the information I needed to make those mechanics work more efficiently. I had a lot of difficulty at times just figuring out who was shooting at me and even when I did, it was tough to get line-of sight to return fire.

I can see where I'm supposed to go but I still can't get there.

I also had a lot more trouble getting to where the map said I needed to be than seemed reasonable. On several occasions I spent longer trying to figure out a path through the broken landscape to the mission marker than it took me to finish the mission when I got there. 

Other games, specifically more modern games, have conditioned me to expect to be able to grapple, leap, climb or parkour my way smoothly and sometimes thrillingly across all kinds of terrain and past all sorts of obstacles, so this return to painstakingly picking out a path that wasn't blocked by unclimbable slopes or invisible walls felt quite frustrating.

I realize it's very likely that some of this is an artifact of low-level gameplay and that vertical progression will introduce ways and means of moving through the landscape faster and more efficiently. Even so, the low-level gameplay itself would still need to be quite a bit more entertaining and involving to persuade me the wait would be worth it.

Another factor that tended to put me off was the gunplay, something of a problem for a shooter. I had real problems hitting anything I was aiming at, not an issue I've often experienced in other titles in the genre. Despite the UI providing a large, red targeting circle complete with with crosshairs, I rarely saw any impact let alone any damage, even with it placed squarely on the center of the body mass of my intended victim,

I couldn't even figure out if I was doing anything wrong. I'd aim at one mob and fire repeatedly with no discernible effect, then at another and see all the shots land, and yet as far as I could tell I was doing the exact same thing each time. The effect was often reciprocal, with baddies pumping round after round into me as I stood out in the open and yet nothing apparently happening.

There is some kind of technological "Shield" element in play, certainly with player-characters and possibly therefore with NPCs and mobs as well, but if the bullets were being absorbed or repelled by some kind of force barrier, I wasn't seeing any confirmation of it in the feedback the game was putting out. That kind of thing seemed to happen all too often.

I'm a sucker for a bit of lens-flare.

All fighting seemed to take place in a strange, performative, informational void, where everyone posed a lot and ran around shouting, while little of any substance actually happened. I took part in several dynamic events with other players, all of which we won and some of which I even contributed to, after a fashion, but I never really knew what we were doing or why. If there were any rewards or benefits other than the supposed fun of it, I didn't get to hear about those either.

There were other problems. I kept getting pop-ups telling me I needed to upgrade but I couldn't figure out what or how. When I started opening windows to find out, I ended up on a screen that literally would not allow itself to be closed until I'd made an upgrade choice, even though it gave no information of substance about what any of the choices meant. I had to pick two at random because it was that or close the game altogether.

That pretty much put the cap on Defiance for me. It was clearly going to require a lot more in the way of both research and concentration than the gameplay seemed like it would ever adequately reward. I found myself thinking not only how much more fun I'd be having in Once Human but also in The First Descendant, another shooter I was enjoying until I forgot I was supposed to be playing it.

That led me to think of all the other games I could be playing instead, not just shooters, and all of a sudden the whole prospect of playing Defiance at all seemed untenable. I logged out and, while I haven't yet uninstalled, it seems unlikely I'll log in again.

Meanwhile, the game seems to be doing very well on its unexpected return, at least in terms of winning interest. More people want to play than the servers will allow which, while not ideal, is certainly a better problem for the new owners to have than no-one wanting to play at all.

I wish Defiance well and I don't regret the short time I spent finding out I'd been right to ignore it the last two times it came around. If nothing else, its reappearance has put Fawkes on my radar. Always nice to stumble upon a potential new source of MMORPGs I haven't tried yet. Maybe I'll like one of their other titles better.

Fleeting First Impressions Of The First Descendant

This morning I successfully logged into The First Descendant via GeForceNow, using a clever trick I discovered: it's called patience. It turns out there isn't any actual problem with the game per se - I'd been giving up too quickly. It takes frickin' forever to load.

Or it does the first time, anyway. I took a second run at it this afternoon and it wasn't nearly so bad. Still took ages but I only had time to tab out and read a couple of items on my news feeds before the game was ready. The first time, I could have taken Beryl for a walk round the block and made myself a coffee when I got back and I still wouldn't have been in.

Was it worth it? Hmmm....

I mean, I've clocked up a little over two hours. I did go back for a second session. I am probably going to play again. So... Maybe?

Let's go through what happened. I'm not even going to call this a First Impressions post. It's more like Fleeting Impressions. Which is a good idea for a new category, now I come to think of it.

The whole thing starts, as these things usually do, with a cut-scene or a video, whichever you prefer to call it. It was slick enough but it felt like whoever wrote the script was really phoning it in. I'm used to these things not making much sense but this was just gibberish.

Also very thin on detail. I'm used to being overwhelmed by tidal waves of lore coming at me from the start, often in the form of some deeply portentous narration that tells me far more about the setting than I have any need to know at that point. I'm not used to getting to the end and finding myself thinking "I could have done with a bit more context there."

Since it's come up, let's talk about the plot. It's nonsense, even by the astonishingly low standard of F2P video games. Earth got overrun by - I don't know... Aliens? Demons? Something nasty, anyway. They came from... no, I don't know that, either. Somewhere bad, I guess. 

Wherever they came from, we fought them and lost. And by "We" I mean Earth which, as always, immediately turned into a single, unified military-political entity in the face of existential threat because that's what would happen, right? 

Then another existential threat, bigger than the last one, arrived and kicked both our asses (That's us and the original bad guys.) or at least I think it was both but maybe the new bad guys were on the old bad guys' side...

Oh, who frickin' cares? None of it matters. None of it will have any consequences. It's there because it's expected and that's all.

It doesn't make any more sense when you get into the game proper either but no-one is playing this thing for the story. In my case, it didn't help that the Tutorial has noticeable narrative similarities to parts of the Black Shores storyline that I'm the middle of in Wuthering Waves, and when I say similarities I mean similar in the way your four year-old niece's fairy cycle is similar to a Harley Davidson Electra Glide.

Let's forget about the storyline. Nexon clearly did. What works a lot better is the voice acting and dialog. Not that anyone says anything that makes any sense there either but they say it with more conviction than it deserves and they say a lot of it, too. There's endless chuntering in the background, even during missions, as the various NPCs talk amongst themselves. It makes the place feel lived-in, if nothing else.

Did I skip Character Creation? No, not really. You don't get to make your own character. It's pick one from a list. A short list. There's a choice of three. There's a blonde woman, a guy who looks like he used to be in a boy band before he was drafted and some musclebound giant in an suit of armor that looks like one of Tony Stark's rejects.

Guess who I picked. Yes, obviously. I did at least look at what they all could do before I made a decision but even though the pretty boy had the abilities I liked most, I still went for the girl.

She has a name. They all have names. I've spent two hours playing her, though, and I can't remember what it is. I know it begins with a "V". Wait! Is it Viessa? I think it might be. Let me check... Yes! I remembered! She must have made more of an impression than I thought.

Viessa has cold powers. She can freeze things. I know she can because it says so in the mouseover descriptions on her skill bar. I certainly didn't know it from anything she did in the many, many fights she won for me. 

A lot of the time the icons had padlocks on them to show they weren't available but even when they were unlocked and I pressed the right keys, I couldn't tell what they were doing. Except for the "Q" key. That one fired missiles. I used it whenever it was off cooldown. I couldn't see anything freezy about the results, though. It just seemed to blow things up.

Mostly I stuck with the gun. Or the guns, I should say. She carries three because in games like this everyone lugs around a sniper rifle, a semi-automatic and a shotgun. It would be irresponsible not to.

In fact, by the time I stopped, Viessa had well over a dozen guns on her. Somewhere. I have no clue where she got them all let alone how she could walk while carrying them. I imagine they dropped off mobs I killed and I picked them up by running over them. That seems to be the preferred method of acquisition here.

And I like it. Saves time. Most of the mobs spew out power-ups - red for health, blue for "MP",which I assume doesn't stand for Mana Points, green for... not sure what green is. Ammo, maybe? 

Ammo is color-coded. It comes in green, amber and purple, which I think tells you what kind it is not what quality. Honestly, I'm going to have to go read an out-of-game guide if I carry on playing because there's just waaaay too much information coming at me in the game itself. 

The First Descendant is very clearly a game for people who like a lot of details. The kind who take notes and fill out spreadsheets. For fun. It would be intimidating if the game wasn't so darn easy.

It was the promise of unchallenging content in Tyler's review that attracted me to the game in the first place and so far I have not been disappointed. I managed not only to finish the Tutorial but the first sequence of missions as well. I think I leveled up at least three times and I opened the second mission area.

It was fun. The environments are visually appealing, for a war zone. Movement is fast and fluid. There's double jump and a grappling iron and you can climb. I bet there are gliders later.

At starter level, mobs seem to have the armor class of a wet paper bag and the hit points of a sickly gnat. Most die in one or two shots but nothing survives a volley. The main way they manage to inflict damage is by sniping or coming at you by the dozen, often in a conga line that means if you line them up just so,  you can watch them explode, one after another, like a string of fireworks.

Since they also drop heals all you need to do is run over them to refill your hit points, I found it next to impossible to go much below 90% health until I hit a bunch of mobs that didn't drop anything at all. That was the only time I died, mostly because I didn't notice it was happening until my screen went red around the edges.

It didn't matter because you get five attempts at a mission before it fails so I just respawned about ten yards away and carried on. I would have assumed this was purely for the newbie zones, to get you into the swing of things, had Tyler not strongly suggested the whole game is that way.

It suits me fine. I am not one of those people who gets bored quickly when things are too easy. More the reverse, really. There does come a point when I start to wonder what the point is but usually not until I start running out of interesting things to see or do.

That kind of attitude does mean I ought to avoid grouping with other players who'd rather take it all more seriously. TFD is a multiplayer game, if you want it to be. The tutorial tells you it's possible to set your missions to be either Private or Public but although I spotted that option, I missed how to set it, so my first time out I ended up in a group.

No-one said anything of course. Everyone just ran around on their own, barely in sight of each other. It was the first mission, after all. Most likely no-one had a clue what to do. My first session ended when I decided I'd better quit before I did something that would get me yelled at.

Next time, I made sure to set the mission as Private, which meant I could take it at my own pace and explore a bit. Not that there's all that much to see. The zones are more functional than scenic. Still, while it's new, it's interesting enough.

Performance on the laptop via GeForceNow's servers was excellent in private instances but the first time I zoned into the hub zone, where all the facilities are and where everyone hangs out, it turned into a slide-show. I could barely move and opening windows from the UI was hit or miss at best. 

I did manage to get Options open and as I expected the GeForceNow default for graphics was Very High. Once I'd changed that to Medium everything was absolutely fine again and the game looked almost as good, too. I see there are a lot of Optimization guides for playing the game on PC, most of which seem to recommend turning things off or down, so I'm quite happy to leave everything on Medium, at least for now.

When I was able to move again I went to the post-robot to check my mail. I had plenty. Even though I only started today, my mailbox was full of rewards for participating in various betas and events I'd obviously never done. I even got something for reaching Level 20, which was a surprise since I was Level 2 at the time.

I'm guessing this is an artifact of the GeF orceNow process but who knows. Tyler did say they were handing out a lot of freebies although I think he was talking abut the Winter event that's still running. I got stuff for that, too.

There was quite a bit of in-game cash in my mail, too. I looked in the shop to see what I could buy with it. I saw a good few things I fancied but I managed to stop myself buying any of them just yet. I think I need to do a bit of research first.

Which does suggest I'm thinking of playing some more. I'd at least like to get the dog. And maybe a few cosmetics.

That's how they get you, isn't it?

A Fleeting FireFall Fly-By

Last night I went futzing around in FireFall. They're having some kind of pre-Open Beta weekend where anyone can play the Closed Beta one last time, which to me sounds uncannily like an Open Beta in itself but what do I know? Anyway, due to having signed up for the closed beta long ago on an email address I rarely remember to check I'd missed every single previous invitation Red5 sent me, so what the hey...

Everything I know about FireFall comes from a series of posts at Healing The Masses. J3w3l made it sound pretty interesting if a little rough around the edges. Having spent all of two hours there last night I am in no position to offer anything other than the firstest of first impressions but I can say this much: it looks good and it feels fun.

Smile when you call me generic.

Graphically it's broad-brush. The look is serious-cartoon. There's a lot of flat matte color swash and something of that old-school hand-drawn tv animation vibe, like the way you might half-remember Johnny Quest looking until you foolishly go watch some on YouTube. Lots of unfussy detailing in the lush environments. It's a winner on visuals.

Character creation is perfunctory to say the least, something that's partially explained when you're introduced to the New You machine during the rather good Tutorial. It appears there are more options; you can change your appearance up to and including your gender at will, only it costs Red Beans and beans means dollars. FireFall's a F2P and funding has to come from somewhere.

Who doesn't like a bit of Barry?

Still, I was perfectly happy with my basic, free look. Well, happy might be going a bit far. The female character model seems to have legs about seven yards long and the at-rest stance of a New Zealand prop doing the Hakka (which is, weirdly, the /dance routine the Charr get in GW2). It was jarring at first but I'd stopped noticing it after a few minutes because the animations otherwise are fluid and satisfying.

Fluid and satisfying describes the basic gameplay; the nuts and bolts of moving, shooting and, especially Thumping. J3w3l covers Thumping extensively in the above-linked posts but in a sentence it amounts to hitting the ground with a very big hammer to locate resources then calling down an air-strike to mine them, something that understandably annoys the local wildlife, leading to large-scale brawling.

Getting ahead of myself. First there are battleframes to choose from in a Tutorial phase very similar to the one in The Secret World where you get to try out all the weapon types. Battleframes equate to classes, effectively, but you aren't locked to any particular one, just one at a time. Obviously. Try wearing two exoskeletons at once, see how far that gets you.

I can heal you. With a gun. Just come a bit closer...

There were five on offer in the Tutorial (there are a lot more to collect as you get further into the game I believe). I picked the Accord BioTech aka Healer on the grounds that it's always good to be able to heal yourself. Although as it turned out I never had the chance. I was either alive or dead with no discernible transition.

Either I must be getting used to these various reticule/mouselook systems or FireFall has a particularly straightforward one because I found the controls very comfortable and natural right from the start. Shooting things was no problem. I did have a little trouble with my Jetpack at first but I soon got the hang of it.

Having too much fun to take a decent screenshot.

Ah, the Jetpack. What a wonderful imaginary invention it is! One of my all-time favorite MMO things. I first encountered jetpacks in that long-forgotten, much missed MMOFPS progenitor Endless Ages which I played a good deal back in beta sometime around 2001-2002. And until last night I believe that was probably the last time I encountered them as well.

More jetpacks please, developers. I need the practice. Mostly I veered about wildly, crashing through the arboreal canopy before descending ignominiously to bounce off some building and land in a heap on the ground. Pro tip: never land in water. Yes it looks soft but you're in a high-tech, electronic rig-out and electricity and water do not play well together. Or at all. Instant death.

Once the novelty of the jetpack wore off (a bit) I tried Thumping. Took me a few goes to understand the UI there but like all the controls I encountered, once understood it was very easy to use. I was somewhat impressed with the UI overall. It's minimalistic, leaving the vast majority of the screen clear, while the bits you do see are elegant, attractive and comprehensible.

Doesn't it look just a little like a rabbit?

Thumping is fun. I found a good spot and called down my Thumper. (Another Pro Tip - don't stand on the spot you just marked for the Calldown gawping up at the incoming Thumper as it arrows down at you from the skies. It's a big chunk of hardware. It will hit you on the head and kill you. Like it did me). Once my Thumper was up and running, making the extremely satisfying noise which may have earned it it's name, two things happened. Various malevolent arthropods emerged from the jungle undergrowth and tried to eat both me and the Thumper and hordes of other players appeared out of the air to help me kill them.

Clubbing. It has two meanings.

Calling down a Thumper in FireFall seems to have about the same effect as whipping out your BeatBox in Free Realms, only with more machine-gun fire and less break dancing. As a game mechanic it really has a lot going for it. I could see plenty of other MMOs borrowing this one.

I filled my first Thumper with nothing but dirt, which earned me a sarcastic comment from the guy in my headset who seems to act as some kind of remote commentator/advisor. (It's worth noting that the voiceovers and dialog that I heard and read were above average throughout. We're not talking TSW here but definitely a cut above basic MMO ham acting and scribbles). On my second attempt I took the trouble to pay attention to the read-outs from my Prospecting hammer, found a better spot and filled my Thumper with some kind of gas. That was unexpectedly satisfying.

And that's where I called it a day. I will be back for Open Beta, time permitting, when maybe I will find out what the game is actually about. If nothing else it seems like a very interesting structure for an MMO, knitting Gathering, Dynamic Events and PvP together in a way that I can't recall seeing before. And it looks gorgeous. Definitely deserves further investigation.