Same Same But Different

I was going to take (another) day off from posting because I was out for much of the day and I didn't have anything I particularly wanted to talk about but then I was idly scrolling through all the Amazon Prime Gaming and Steam games I haven't played (or installed) yet and I happened to notice two or three occurrences that looked like they might tie together into a quick post. So here we are.

It's something of a follow-on, thematically at least, from the post I wrote on Monday about playing the gaming field and not staying loyal to a single game, a topic and a concept I'm still mulling. With Solasta out of the way, I've been in search of a game to fill that pause-friendly, tactics-heavy, somewhat cerebral slot and I was browsing the possibilities to see if I already had something that would fit the bill or whether I'd need to find something to buy.

To forestall the inevitable suggestion, obviously the best choice would be Baldur's Gate 3 but I'm definitely not spending that much money. I may see if I can get someone to give it me for my birthday or Christmas although if there's one major downside to  digital distribution it's that it renders video games entirely unsuitable as gift recommendations for aging relatives. Until then it'll have to be something on a budget or preferably free.

While I was dithering, I took a side-turn and started playing Crowns and Pawns, a classic point & click adventure I bought on sale earlier this year. It ticks the pause and brain boxes but as I discovered, after an hour of mostly enjoyable puzzle-solving, it does absolutely nothing to scratch that tactical itch. I'll definitely keep on with it because it seems like a really good game - just not the game I'm looking for right now.

I also tried Shadowrun: Dragonfall, a tactical rpg I picked up at 90% off recently, which ought to have been exactly what I was after but very much wasn't. While it absolutely nailed the tactical elements as well as being fully pausable, it failed to engage my interest in either the characters or the plot. The minute size of the characters and the lack of anything much in the way of visual effects had the unfortunate effect of making the combat seem perfunctory, even though it probably has at least as much going on as the games I'm comparing it with unfavorably. I might give it another go but I suspect I won't.

With nothing meeting my exacting standards, I found myself idly scanning the news along the top of the Steam screen, which was where I was reminded of a couple of items I'd read earlier, along with some new news I hadn't seen before. Two games I'm kinda-sorta still playing are on the cusp of turning themselves inside out in the hope of attracting interest and players and it occurred to me that, if I wanted to see how that went, I'd probably have to start both of them over from the beginning.

Starting over seems to be a recurring theme just now. I wrote recently that I'm on hiatus from Once Human because I haven't quite decided if I want to start afresh on a Seasonal server, either right now or as soon as a different scenario becomes available. Now it seems I can add both Nightingale and New World to that decision tree.

I hadn't really considered the quasi-relaunch of New World, under the New World: Aeternum brand to be something that would necessitate a clean start. I suppose it doesn't, per se, but having read Tyler Edwards' piece on his experience of the press version of the upcoming beta it seems fairly clear that there's at least an opportunity to begin again anew.

The Nightingale marketing department, meanwhile, is urgently attempting to explain to worried punters that that the upcoming Realms Rebuilt update, a rewrite so extensive I have seen it described as a relaunch, will allow players to clone their current online characters to the offline version of the game. 

This, apparently, will take place in something called Legacy Mode, the explanation for engaging with which requires a very complicated FAQ, which I have skimmed but don't yet fully understand. It appears that as of tomorrow, when I next log into Nightingale, all my character slots will be empty but somehow I will be able to recover my "old" characters and play them offline, even if I haven't done anything to prepare for the wipe.

I have to say all of this came as a complete surprise to me. I didn't even realise the update constituted a full character wipe. If I was currently playing Nightingale I might have been a tad miffed. Since I'm not, though, I'm choosing to see it as an opportunity to start the game again from the beginning.

But is it an opportunity I want to take? I enjoyed both New World (Almost 250 hours played.) and Nightingale (Over 100.) but do I want to do it all over again, slightly differently? 

I certainly didn't get much value out of My Time At Sandrock, which I bought at a very early stage, while it was still in early development, then ended up hardly playing at all. I jumped on it because I'd really enjoyed My Time At Portia but it transpired that playing what turned out to be a very similar game (At least at that early stage of development.) didn't light the same fires.

Now I see that the My Time crew are trailing a Kickstarter for a third game in the series, My Time At Evershine and for no good reason whatsoever I find myself quite excited by the prospect all over again. I have at least learned my lesson. I won't be pledging or buying in to Early Access. Even so, when the game finally arrives in a full-featured, launch version, I wouldn't bet against me buying it anyway

A few years ago - okay quite a few years ago - starting over in games and playing through the same content only slightly differently was pretty much standard operating procedure for me. As my EQ25 series is more than amply demonstrating, I used to make a lot of characters in the same MMORPGs, especially when there were different starting areas.

Yeebo posted today about the attraction of all those very different class stories in Star Wars: the Old Republic. I commented to say that the sheer number of stories had actually put me off the game and it did to an extent but I'm sure it would have the opposite effect had the game been around back in my EverQuest days. I'd have taken it as an opportunity to play lots of characters without having to go through the exact same content every time.

The question I'm asking myself, as I look at the revamps of New World and Nightingale and the possibility of a third My Time game, is whether I still find the prospect of rolling a new character in the same game as appealing as it once was. It's a question that applies, not equally but to a significant degree, to my search for a suitable replacement for the turn-based, tactical combat titles I'm craving.

To some extent, every return to a familiar genre or style of game could be said to be tantamount to playing the same content with a different skin. It's just a matter of degree. There's a considerable appeal to the familiar and the more I think about starting over, the more I remember how much I used to enjoy it.

Maybe I'll take the opportunity to see if any of that enjoyment is still there to be had. I could even give SW:tOR another run. 

Okay, let's not get carried away...

Jumpstyle Is Not A Crime

Since I ran up against the buffers in Nightingale I've been game-hopping like crazy. Typically, when I was spending all my time in one game, I complained about feeling trapped. Now I'm back to jumping between half a dozen games it's giving me the jitters. There's no pleasing some people.

The games I'm "playing" just now (Although that's a very fancy word for what I'm actually doing when I log into some of them.) are:

• New World
• AdventureQuest 3D
• Once Human Closed Beta 3
• EverQuest II
• Nightingale
• The Dungeon of Nahalbeuk: Amulet of Chaos

I don't have one of those fancy apps that tallies exactly how much time I spend in each of them but I can say with a fair degree of confidence that it isn't a lot. I doubt it's more than a couple of hours altogether most days.

As well as those six, I have a mental list of about twice as many games I feel I ought to be playing - or could be playing - or was in the middle of playing before I stopped for no good reason. Those include:

• Valheim
• Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit
• Tales Noir Preludes
• Imposter Factory
• Lake
• My Time At Sandrock

There are more - potentially a lot more - but that's a round dozen so I'll call it there, just so I have time to give a little gloss on each of them, starting with the ones I'm at least managing to log into once in a while:

New World - I came back for the Spring event and kind of hung around. I've been logging in most days to do the rounds of the settlements and festival camps so I can pick up my freebies, especially the tokens. I've bought some of the furniture I wanted and I have a couple more days to get the rest. I need to remember to spend everything I've earned because the event currency vanishes along with the event itself a tthe end of April.

Other than that, I've done a few quests and I feel like I might carry on and do a few more, just for the fun of it. Questing in New World is generally entertaining and I see new quest markers everywhere I go. Unfortunately, I'd need to buy the expansion to level any further and I think it's a bit steep at £25.  I'm somewhat discouraged to do too much questing while the xp goes nowhere so I'll probably shelve this one soon in anticipation of whatever the Big Announcement in June might be. Maybe that will make it feel like it's worth buying the DLC.

AdventureQuest 3D - I log in every day just to collect my three daily chests. There are two reasons I keep doing it: 1) The first chest always gives some cash shop currency and I want some for housing items and 2) AQ3D has by far the fastest login process I've ever seen. 

Seriously, it's like lightning. I wish every MMORPG was even half as fast. I just timed it and it took 28 seconds from Pressing "Play" in Steam to looking at my character in game. I can log in, get my chests and be back in Steam in under a minute although I don't usually go quite that fast. Of course, I'm not actually playing the game but there's certainly nothing being put in my way if I wanted to, which is more than I can say about a lot of games - *cough* Lord of the Rings *cough*

Once Human CB3 - I logged into this one for the first time in a couple of weeks last night and my house was gone! That was a shock. It turned out to be more of a feature than a glitch, though. It seems that if you don't log in for a while (I don't know what the time-limit is.) your house automatically gets copied and stored using the system designed for moving home. 

All you have to do to restore it is find a new spot and put down the blueprint and it magically reappears, just as it was, with all the furniture in the right place. It seems like a very ingenious solution to the endless problem all games with open-world housing have, namely absentee homeowners. This way, no-one has to look at hundreds of abandoned homes and all the best building spots can be taken by people who are going to use them.

Once Human has a lot of clever design features like that. Yesterday I ran across the game's ingenious solution to that other annoying trope of so many F2P MMORPGs, player-owned strip malls. You must have seen them; dozens, scores, hundreds of stalls put up by players to sell their goods, all crammed together in a particularly ugly form of urban blight.

In OH, players sell from pick-up trucks on which they place vending machines. These fit so well into the post-apocalyptic environment, already littered as it is with broken-down vehicles and machinery, it took me a good while to realize what they were. They also have the benefit of all being different. I haven't found out how you get one yet but it looks as though once you have one, you can furnish and decorate it like a room in your house. I wonder if you can also drive about in it? There are vehicles in the game, so I don't see why not.

I want to do at least one more full post about Once Human soonish, so I'll leave it at that for now. I don't plan on playing much more of CB3 but that's only because I want to save my enthusiasm for when the game goes live. I did do some exploring yesterday, though, which is where all the pictures in this post came from. It's fun just driving around on my motorcycle, looking at the scenery. I might do some more of that before the beta ends.

EverQuest II - I'm in and out of this one as usual. This morning I finished the Signature Questline from the current expansion, Ballads of Zimarra, which would normally be a big moment. Instead it turned out to be something of an anti-climax. 

For one thing, it's the first expansion for a long time where finishing the Sig hasn't also put me at the level cap. My Berserker is still only half way through Level 128. For another, there isn't a big, explosive ending to the storyline - just a regular fight with a named mob I wouldn't even call a Boss, followed by a hand-in, at which point you get a pop-up telling you the Sig line is finished.

It transpires there's a reason for that. The Signature Quest might have stopped but the quest faucet is still jammed full on. Other NPCs nearby immediately sprout feathers over their heads and everything carries on as before. I looked ahead on the wiki and there are tons more quests of all sorts in the expansion, many in direct line of sequence from the Sig. 

I'm not sure why they've done it this way although no doubt there are reasons. It's fine with me, anyway. Now I can just carry on chipping away until I eventually hit 130. I'd like to get it done before the Anashti Sul server arrives in June. That shouldn't be too hard...

Nightingale - As I said the other day, the changes they've made aren't significant enough to get me back playing regularly again. I would like to re-visit all the vendors so I can buy stuff directly from the UI in future, though. That would be a project in itself.

The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: Amulet of Chaos - The wild card on this list, being both the only game that's both solo and offline. It's also the one I've been playing the most. I've had a session most evenings, usually lasting a couple of hours, which is sometimes as long as it takes to finish a single battle.

I really like the gameplay. It's one of those XCom-style, turn-based, tactical group combat games, only with a high-fantasy skin. Lots of setting people on fire, knocking them down and hiding behind things until someone blows them up. All of that.

It's also - loosely - a parody and I was wary of what that might mean in the way of "humor" but it's largely okay. The voice acting is just the right side of amateurish and the jokes rise just above embarrassingly cliched. I wouldn't call it witty or original but it raises the odd smile and the characters... have character.

The game also seems to go on forever. I feel like I've been playing it for months. I know I'm doing all the side quests but I feel if I wasn't my party wouldn't be tough enough to handle the main quest so it doesn't feel like that's much of an option. Anyway, I'm enjoying it and I hope one day I might even finish it.

And now the ones I'm thinking - but not doing much - about...

Valheim  - Wilhelm writing about this one again reminds  me I ought to go back and at least take a look at the Mistlands. I had a terrible start with that biome, although from what Wilhelm says that was likely the developers' intention. 

I'm not even going to bother trying to play the game properly any more but luckily I don't need to because I've switched all the mobs to Passive, meaning I can go explore without fear of being jumpd on by a spider the size of an elephant, moving as fast as a cheetah. I mean, does that sound like fun to anyone?

I was tempted to go back and have a wander around yesterday but then I thought about the final biome, Ashlands, which is in testing now and should be going live in a matter of weeks. It probably makes more sense to wait for that and then explore both biomes together. If I do, I won't be switching mob aggro on for that either, I'll tell you that for nothing!

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit - I bought this in January. Haven't even logged in yet. Every time I see it in my Steam Library I feel uncomfortable. Maybe I'll start on it as soon as I finish Naheulbeuk.

Tales Noir Preludes  - I bought this around the same time and played it right away. I was really enjoying it but then I stopped, for no reason I can recall. I keep meaning to carry on from where I left off but somehow I never do. Must try harder.

Imposter Factory - Much the same story for this one, although I got further before I stopped.

Lake - And this one! I have no idea why this keeps happening. I have a post in mind to write about Lake, too. Something very odd happens in it. Twice, in fact. 

I thought I might already have posted about that but search suggests I haven't. I guess I could tell you what the Odd Thing is now but there's still the outside possibility it might happen more than twice, so I really ought to finish the game first, just in case.

My Time At Sandrock - Will I ever play this damn game? I very much doubt it. 

I almost wish I hadn't bought it, now. I feel like its whole schtick has been done by so many other games, I can't really see the point. Then again, the My Time At... games probably do it better than most of them, so why play any of those, when I already have this one installed? 

And there we have it. Not so much a post, more of a to-do list. Maybe putting it all down on paper will even inspire me to get some of it done.

I kinda doubt it but you have to try something, don't you?

My Time At Palia

*** Foreword ***

When Blaugust began, I thought I'd be very clever and write a few extra posts to keep in my back pocket for the inevitable days when I didn't have the time or the energy. That strategy has served me well so far, removing all of the stress I felt last year, when I just relied on being able to wing it. Not that there was all that much stress but none is better than even a little.

As I was writing ahead, there was one problem I didn't foresee. Now we're half way through the month, some of the posts have dated quite badly. Yesterday's post was one of those. This is another.

I wrote both posts more than a couple of weeks ago, at which time I'd just started playing Palia and had been playing Dragon Nest 2 for a little while. I imagined I'd be playing both of them for the whole of Blaugust but I was reckoning without Dawnlands, which grabbed my attention from the moment I started playing and all but pushed Palia, DN2 and even Noah's Heart out of the cozy rotation I had going for a short while.

I had been planning on posting some more about Dawnlands today but instead I've decided to get this post out of draft before it dries up and blows away. There's still some juice in it but bear in mind 

• I haven't played Palia in over a week
• I haven't seen it under Open Beta conditions
• I haven't seen the new content patch
• I would have written this whole post very differently if I'd also had Dawnlands to compare and contrast because all these games have a lot of synergies.

With those caveats, here we go...

When Belghast put up a post about the Palia beta yesterday, he gave it the telling title "Stardew Landmark Crossing". When I left a comment there, I got myself all tangled up trying to make a comparison of my own and somehow ended up with a non-existent game called "My Time At Palia". As I'm about to demonstrate, it was a felicitous mistake.

It's apparent from the early impressions I've been reading that everyone is seeing whichever previous cosy collecting and gathering game they've played before, closely replicated in the form of an MMORPG. That, presumably, was the developers' intention and it raises a worrisome question not just about this genre but all of them. 

I've heard it said many times (I may have said it myself on occasion.) that if you've played one fantasy MMORPG you've you've played them all. That's demonstrably untrue in close-up but harder to argue with when the focus pulls back.

As I said in my post about the MUSIC test, the more you know about something, the harder to please you're likely to be. That goes for just about everything but it might go double for video games, or at least you might think so if you'd been been reading the same gaming websites as I have.

Similarly, as I was saying in that other post, the opposite also applies. The less you know about something, the lower your standards are going to be when you come to judge it. With fewer examples to compare it with, anything that seems at all enjoyable will also benefit hugely from feeling new as well.

I'm not sure how many games like Palia there are but I'm betting it's a lot. It reminds me somewhat of Landmark (the look of it and the gathering mechanics, specifically) and of Free Realms (The aesthetics again, only more strongly this time, but mainly the relentless cheerfulness and as Tipa pointed out, the job-swapping mechanics.).

It also reminds me, more faintly, of Yonder, largely because of the lack of threat and combat, and there are some faint tinges of Valheim in the mix, but by an order of magnitude at the very least, the games it most reminds me of are My Time At Portia and its sequel My Time At Sandrock. That's why unintentionally calling it "My Time In Palia" felt less like a mistake, more like a handy thumbnail review.

At this point I might begin to list all the ways the Portia and Palia games appear to converge. I will, later. First, though, I'm more concerned with how similar the pair of them might be to a whole load of other games I haven't played. 

I'm aware that I have no personal experience of the best-known games in this genre, which I'm assuming would indeed be Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. I also have only the vaguest understanding of how large the genre is or for that matter what it's even called. 

That level of ignorance makes me ill-equipped to comment on whether Palia is a particularly good example of this kind of game. I can say if it's a good or bad game per se but not if it's unusually good or bad by the prevailing standards of the genre .

Chances are I'm going to think it's better than someone who's played a lot of this kind of thing. I'm more likely to be impressed by things that are new to me, even when they may not be all that well-done, than would be someone to whom they were more familiar. I'm going to be gosh-wowing all over the place, when someone more inured to the tropes of the genre would be yawning and making their excuses.

Without that depth of experience, I'm not even sure whether the very marked similarities I'm seeing between Palia and Portia are suggestive of an unusually congruent design document or whether they're merely features and mechanics common to almost all games of this type, the way "kill ten rats" quests or raids predominate in MMORPGs.

It's probably time I listed a few of what seem to me common aspects of Palia and Portia that make me occasionally forget which of the games I'm actually playing. I'm not talking about the absolute basics like both having trees you chop down with an axe or rocks you break with a pick. That'd be like saying all games that have monsters you kill are alike.

It's things like the world being filled with ruins from a mysterious social collapse that happened so long ago no-one really remembers anything much about it. It's the presence of robots who persist from the before-times but don't want to share any information about the past. It's the necessity of recovering a technology that's long been lost.

It's the design and even the names of the machinery you make and place on your housing plot and it's the specific mechanics of how they work. The way you add materials via a notice board or a hopper. It's the way you have to wait for real-world hours to make a stack of bricks.

It's the way you build up relationships with the locals by talking to them and giving them presents. It's the personalities of those NPCs, the kind of things they say. Even just walking around the town feels like walking around Portia.

I find it uncanny and a little unnerving but I don't really believe that Palia is any more similar to Portia than WildStar was similar to World of Warcraft. I think it's more that, just as someone unfamiliar with MMORPGs would see a lot more in common between those two games than someone steeped in the genre, I don't know enough to be able to say why Palia is wildly different from Portia.

It reminds me of how general chat in every new MMORPG always used to fill up claims that the game was either better or worse than WoW, even when it wasn't very much like WoW at all. It's just that, when WoW is the only benchmark you have, every other virtual world looks like Azeroth.

I trust that as I play more I'll see less of Portia in Palia. I hope so, if only because at the moment one of the issues I'm having is that playing Palia keeps reminding me I bought an Early Access copy of Sandrock at the earliest opportunity and I've barely logged in since. I keep wondering why I'm not playing the game I paid for, since I seem to be playing it anyway in this beta.

Of course, the real diffference between the two is that Portia and Sandrock are single-player games, while Palia is an MMO. And that's something else I'm having problems with.

As I've said many times, I hugely prefer playing online, among others, even when all I do is solo and never talk to anyone. I've said that just knowing a game-world is shared with thousands, even millions of people makes everything I do there feel more meaningful than if I was playing wholly alone, entirely unseen. 

Playing a game that feels like My Time At Portia, into which I put more than seventy hours, but playing it in a persistent and public arena rather than in private ought to feel both more significant and more satisfying. At the moment it doesn't, quite. Quite the opposite, in fact. 

For possibly the first time ever,  In one recent session I found myself wishing I could play Palia on my own, with no other people around me. I don't think that's ever happened to me in an MMORPG in more than twenty years.

Oh, I've wanted to have parts of an MMORPG to myself so I could get on with things and not have to compete for spawns or mobs or nodes. I've wanted to avoid other players because they were all trying to kill me or steal my stuff or just because they were being bloody annoying or offensive. We've all wanted that.

But all I wanted then was for the annoying players to bugger off and do something else in a different part of the game. I never wanted to kick them all out of the game altogether so I could play it on my own. 

I've tried playing MMORPG-style solo games and it's always been a disappointingly flat experience. If an MMORPG I loved shut down, I'd happily take a single-player version just so I could log in sometimes and remind myself what it used to be like but I'd only want it for a keepsake. I wouldn't put in hundreds, thousands of hours, playing it on my own.

And I don't really want Palia all to myself, either. The thing is, at the moment is it feels so much like playing Portia, I forget I'm even online. Every time I run into someone when I'm out exploring it feels as though there's an intruder in my private garden. It's disturbing and I don't like it.

I'm sure I'll get used to it. I'll have to. Palia is an MMORPG, after all. And if I stick with it, soon enough I'll have played it as long as I played Portia and eventually I'll have played it ten times as long. Seventy hours is a good run in an offline game but a few hundred hours in an MMORPG barely gets you started.

One thing I really can't imagine doing at the moment, though, is playing both Palia and the Portia sequel, Sandrock at the same time. They're just too much alike. That could be awkward. I hear Sandrock is set to leave Early Access for a full launch in September. I was planning on starting over and playing it properly when that happened.

I might well be done with Palia by then but even if I am I could have spoiled my appetite for another game so similar, so soon. Or maybe I'll have seen enough to know the difference and it won't bother me any more. I hope so. 

They say the more you know...

Sandrock, On And Off The Rails

Today was a much better day in Sandrock. There was none of the lag or stuttering that made playing such a struggle yesterday, although moving from area to area still took longer than it should. 

The Steam screenshot key now works and the game appears in the "View" list, complete with the correct link to the right local drive. I did try following Pallais' suggestion but I didn't see any change until the latest update from Pathea. They're hotfixing every day at the moment and even though nothing in the patch notes seemed to relate to my issues, maybe it comes under "bug fixes" or "optimization".  

Or more likely my computer isn't playing the giddy goat with me for once. It's becoming increasingly clear I'll have to upgrade sooner rather than later, not least because it's now beginning to fail to reach the Minimum Required Specifications for games I would like to play rather than, as it has done for years, games I have no interest in playing.

For example, thanks to some powerful endorsements, I've had my eye on both Horizon Zero Dawn and V Rising. I put HZD on my Steam wishlist a while ago and this week it went on sale at half price. I was about to buy it when I thought to check the minimum specs and saw it would be very much touch and go whether I'd be able to run it at all, let alone find the experience enjoyable.

As for V Rising, I miss the minimum spec for that one by a mile. My PC is six years old and I've never upgraded a single component in that time so it's hardly surprising. The question now is whether I upgrade the obvious, easy to install items like the graphics card, RAM and processor or whether I just replace the whole thing.  

I live on the wrong side of the tracks. Literally.

I'd definitely do it piece by piece and hope to get maybe another three years out of it but I have a suspicion my recent problems may stem from some failing in the motherboard itself. I'd hate to buy a bunch of new pieces and then find they made things even worse. 

Anyway, fingers crossed, everything's working at the moment so I'm going to kick that particular stone down the road for now. I'm sure I can get by with the games the machine can run. There must only be about ten million of them.

Getting back to Sandrock, I'm finding it considerably harder to get going there than I remember from when I started in Portia. Things seem less intuitive somehow, even though the gameplay is all but identical. 

There are a number of possible explanations for that:

• My memory is bad (Known fact!) and Portia was just as difficult at the beginning.
• Sandrock is more complex under the apparently similar surface.
• Early Access means the game isn't yet as polished as Portia was at release, when I bought it.
• I am getting worse at playing games.

Any or all of these could be true. None of them mean I'm not having a good time, though. In some ways, the more I have to scratch my head about it, the better I like it.

One thing I'm less keen on is the time management aspect of the game, which so far seems identical to Portia. That's something I'd forgotten about or more probably blanked in that way we have of only remembering the good parts of experiences we broadly enjoyed, while conveniently forgetting the bad. 

I find it interesting that most descriptions of the "My Time At..." series describe them as "Building Games". The Steam Store page for Sandrock puts building front and center: "After accepting a job offer to become Sandrock’s newest Builder, you’ll arrive in the wild and rugged city-state, where it’s up to you and your trusty tools to restore the community to its former glory. Gather resources to build machines, befriend locals, and defend Sandrock from monsters — all while saving the town from economic ruin!" 

The player character is even referred to as "Builder" by every NPC. There's really no getting away from the idea. And yet it's not at all what I think of when I hear the term. Landmark was a Building Game. Minecraft is a Building Game. A Building Game is a game where you build things.

My workshop, named after one of my favorite books, Flora Segunda of Crackpot Hall. That's Flora, standing in front of it, too.

You don't really build anything in Portia or Sandrock. You manufacture things and place them in specific locations dictated by the game. That's not building. 

The "My Time At..." series is well-named.  The way you spend time is crucial to the experience. These are Time Management Games. Almost everything you're required to do revolves around timed events, from the micro to the macro. There are annual events that come around on the calendar, there are projects you're given that have deadlines, there are daily construction orders, there's a weekly competition...you even have a set bedtime!

More significantly, every item you make is constructed from parts that have to be manufactured in various machines and each machine takes a specific number of minutes to make each part. In Portia, like just about everyone else whose experiences I read about, I ended up with assembly lines of machines all chugging away, turning out bricks and bars and widgets by the score.

Of all the elements of the game - exploration, story, gathering, combat, mini-games, social interaction - it's the "Building" I find the least enjoyable. 

I'm not saying I don't enjoy it at all. I find it both entertaining and satisfying up to the point when I've made all the crafting and manufacturing machines and upgraded them as far as they'll go. In Portia, that probably took me well over half of the seventy hours I played, so it seems a bit rich to complain about what happens after that. I'd already had my money's worth by then.

It's a problem that's far from unique either to this series or this genre. Many, perhaps most, games suffer from it. Once you've learned the ropes and made yourself about as capable as you're likely to be, all that's left is to use the skills you've gained and the items you've made and that can all too quickly begin to feel like work, not play.

Wouldn't you rather sit in the shade all day, reading, rather than build stuff for a living?

In other genres, specifically mmorpgs, that becomes the "Endgame Problem" we're all familiar with but in narrative-based "building" games like Sandrock and Portia it's more of a mid-game issue. Those seventy hours I spent in Portia weren't nearly enough to get me to the end of the storyline before I ran out of patience with the never-ending factory management.

Seventy hours, though. It's a long time for a game to hold the attention. Yes, I know mmorpgs rack up thousands of hours and last year I put over 300 hours into Valheim (Nearly 400 by now...) but for a game with a single, linear storyline, seventy hours is some going.

Of course, most of that time I spent hitting rocks with a pick or critters with a stick but even so. If I get anything even close to seventy hours out of Sandrock I'll be very satisfied.

And I never really explored the social aspect last time. I didn't try to date anyone or even really make close friends, let alone get married. It's a major part of both games and it seems quite well-done from what I can tell, although I'm very far from being an aficionado of such systems. Maybe if I focused more on that and less on trying to build all the things I'd feel less like I owed my soul to the company store.

The characters in the two games are worth getting to know, too. They're varied and nuanced and the "wholesome post-apocalyptic world" makes for an unusual backdrop to the usual rivalries and romances. 

Passive-aggressive much, Nia?

The writing isn't at all bad, either. Take, for example, the five-page letter my character received in the mail today. It's from the best friend she left behind when she took the train to Sandrock to become the Builder there. Here, read it for yourself...

That's an impressive piece of correspondence to wake up to, especially when there's no real indication it has any relevance other than to fill out your character's backstory and tell you something about the world she lives in.

The series is good at that kind of worldbuilding, which makes it a very satisfying experience for an explorer, so long as you don't mind reading between the lines. Sometimes, though, I wonder if I'm reading things that just aren't there. 

I was deeply suspicious of the Church in the first game and I'm even more dubious about the branch in Sandrock but I have a suspicion that my suspicions are unfounded. I think I'm too used to expecting darkness beneath the bright surfaces in games like The Secret World or Doki Doki Literature Club to take a "wholesome" world at face value. Maybe these really are just nice people.

Yeah, Maybe. I guess I'll find out if I ever make it to the end of the story this time. I'm certainly going to give it a go.

Catching Up

A couple of updates on previous posts today, just to tidy things up a little. I continue to grub around the peripheries of various games, ticking a few boxes here, indulging a whim there. It keeps me amused but it isn't creating a lot of fresh ideas for posts about gaming. 

This might well be the least gamey I've felt for a couple of decades. Most of my time seems to go either on playing with the dog or doing things around the house and garden. The weather is fairly good and it's nicer to be outdoors doing physical stuff than inside, going digital. It won't last. We'll get some rain soon enough and suddenly sitting in a chair staring at a screen will seem like a much more attractive option.

I've been plugging away dutifully at my Overseer Missions in EverQuest II and I've finally managed to acquire enough Celestial and Fabled quests to fill my ten-a-day quota. It's not quite that straightforward, since some of the Celestials take a little over a day to complete and some equally extraordinary length of time on cooldown but most days I only have to fill in a couple of slots with Legendary missions to make up the shortfall.

The slightly disappointing part, after all the effort I've put in, is that now I've been able to inspect the full loot table, including the Celestial Bonus Chests, there don't seem to be any Fabled weapons, armor or jewellery. There's only Legendary, which tops out at 295 Resolve. 

That's still very useful and upgrades much of what I had from questing but I'm sure there were Fabled items in the previous seasons and those were another five or ten points of resolve above the Legendary. 

Of course, it's all somewhat notional when I'm not actually doing any adventuring. I don't think I've swung a sword or cast a spell in EQII for the best part of a couple of months, even though I log in at least once every day, often two or three times. It does sometimes make me wonder why developers bother creating any old-school adventure content at all. I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer the games without it.

Okay, no I wouldn't, but it is interesting just how long a diet of log-in dailies and setting missions can hold not just my loyalty but also my attention these days. I think I burn out faster on actual adventure activities than I do on the background maintenance. It's no wonder things like World of Warcraft's Garrisons had such appeal for a certain demographic. I fear I might be part of it.

Partly, as must be obvious, the appeal for me comes from working out the mechanics and figuring out just how these things operate. I've mostly got the hang of the latest Overseer season now but I would still like to know just what effect, if any, levels have on the system. 

Overseer xp is painfully slow but I've inched my way to the mid-point of the five-level range. I can't say I've seen any difference. I'm guessing it's nothing more than a qualifying pre-requisite for the next season but even that's a guess. I've always been maxed on the season before so I don't have any direct knowledge of whether you have to hit the cap on the last season before you can do the next.

The other mmorpg I'm still notionally playing is Guild Wars 2, although there, for the first time since they were added not that long after launch, I have finally fallen off the Daily roundabout. There was a while when the puppy made it difficult to get the dailies done every day and somehow that seems to have broken the habit. I could easily find time to do them every day again now but often I just can't be bothered. 

Surprisingly, that doesn't mean I'm not playing at all. I logged in this afternoon to do some more of Living World Season One. I was hoping to find out if we ever get to see any more of the old Lion's Arch but I was also curious to revisit the introduction of Marjory Delaqua. (I'd completely forgotten, naturally, that we all got a doohickey at the conclusion of the original outing that lets you replay the whole thing any time you like.)

After I'd played through the Dead End chapter I was even more curious to compare my feelings today with what I thought about it the first time round, when we were first introduced to the concept of a 1940s film noir detective agency in a 21st century fantasy mmorpg. I had a vague recollection that I'd been a lot more impressed back in 2013 than I was with the rerun nine years later.

In fact, it turns out I barely mentioned. it. I reviewed the Dragon Bash event in full but consigned the story to a single paragraph, where I summed it up as "Good, on the whole". I was considerably more generous towards the Raymond Chandler pastiche back then than I would be if I was reviewing it now, saying it "worked surprisingly well".

This time around I found the writing unconvincing and the voice acting labored. Marjory has always sounded downbeat but on her debut she comes across as just bored. I think it's supposed to convey world-weary cynicism but it just made me feel she wasn't interested either in her work or life in general.

As for seeing more of LA, sadly that didn't happen. It's back to the main plaza, where they haven't even covered the body of the Charr representative, much less moved it to a more suitable resting place. I carried on with the storyline until I got to the part where you have to complete events in Bloodtide Coast to fill a progress bar, at which point I lost patience and gave up. 

For now, anyway. I don't hold much hope that I'll get to see any more of the old, pirate version of LA in the rest of this revamped episode but I'll probably carry on to the end all the same. It is a bit of a nostalgia trip, after all.

And finally, My Time At Sandrock. Bizarrely, there was a news item about the game at NME earlier today. I really wasn't expecting that. It suggests the series has something of a following, since the thrust of the piece is that Sandrock is already more popular than Portia, even in Early Access. 

As I type, MTAS stands at #83 on the Steam chart, one place above Cyberpunk 2077. Just over twelve thousand people are playing but the peak so far is not far off double that.

I've been playing too, but so far I've only notched up about three hours, mostly because it can be a bit of a struggle at times. Nothing to do with the gameplay, which is identical to Portia and a lot of fun. The main problem is loading and transitions. It can take several minutes to get into the game and a couple to move from one location to another within it; opening any window - inventory, map, options - takes thirty seconds or so.

At first I thought it might be yet another problem with my machine and it still might be but there's a note in the latest patch notes saying "Optimization is a high priority" so I 'm hoping it's them, not me.

As soon as I can play comfortably I'll be racking up those hours, I'm sure. At least, I will when it starts raining.

My Time And Sandrock

Let's begin with an apology. Or maybe an explanation. This is the post you should have been reading yesterday.

When I checked my email first thing yesterday morning I was more excited than I would have expected to find a notification from Steam that a game I had on my wishlist had gone into Early Access. Half the titles on the list don't even have realse dates, so it was nice to see some movement at last.

Of course, looked at another way, that means half the titles are already available and yet I haven't bought them, so I guess that means half the titles I say I want I don't actually want as much as all that. Not enough to pay money for, at any rate, but that's a post for another day. This post's about a game I did buy: a game called My Time At Sandrock.

MTAS is, as you might imagine, the sequel to My Time At Portia, a building game of sorts that I played and wrote about back in 2020, during the first Covid lockdown. It actually feels like a good deal longer ago than that, which probably says something about the way time has stretched over the last few years.

According to the email, the asking price for MTAS was only £19.99, which seemed like a very good deal to me. Most of the indie games on my wishlist are priced between £15 to £20 but they're probably only going to be good for ten or fifteen hours play. Sandrock ought to give me four or five times that, based on how long I spent in Portia. 

Checking Steam, I see I have just a hair under seventy hours in My Time At Portia and I know for sure I wasn't even close to finishing. I only stopped because some other game came along and stole my attention. I've been meaning to go back and do some more ever since but what with one thing and another...

If value for money wasn't an issue so the real question hanging over the purchase was whether or not I'd be able find the time to play. Since we got the puppy my gaming time has shrunk to next to nothing. On the other hand, assuming MTAS to be very similar to MTAP, something I felt pretty confident in, it seemed like a good fit for short sessions with a dog asleep on my lap.

More to the point, I immediately knew I wanted to play. As I said, I'd been thinking repeatedly of going back to MTAP, so a brand-new, possibly improved version of the same game had considerable appeal. 

As for the Early Access aspect, as discussed numerous times before it has both benefits and drawbacks. I do like to watch the games grow and change and develop, you get to play sooner rather than having to wait, and quite often it's a cheaper buy-in. I don't know at what price point My Time At Sandrock will launch but I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than £19.99.

As for the drawbacks, I chose not to think about them. I bought the game. Then I downloaded it. And that's where there the trouble began.

I've never had even the smallest problem downloading a game through Steam before. It's always been a seamless process. Not this time. The download stopped about a third of the way through with a "Corrupt Disk" error. 

There was a Retry button so I retried. It happened again. And again.

I googled it and found a list of possible reasons and fixes. I tried a few, stopping short of uninstalling and reinstalling Steam. I started the download going again but I didn't keep an eye on it because about then Mrs Bhagpuss and I had lunch. After that we took Beryl out for a walk and by the time I got back to the computer it was about four in the afternoon.

I was all ready to log in and play, always assuming the game had downloaded successfully. Sadly, it had not. That would have been annoying enough but much worse, the screen was frozen and the entire PC unresponsive. I had to pull the plug and reboot but even a couple of restarts the whole machine remained all but unuseable with everything taking orders of magnitude longer than it should. 

I won't go through the litany of attempted fixes other than to say it took over five hours to get it working again and even now I have no real idea what the problem was. For the final fix, the one that worked, I made the classic mistake of changing a lot things at once, everything from deleting the entire Start Up menu to opening the case and reseating all the components.

One of those things must have been the problem because when I powered up, everything worked perfectly. Better than before, in fact. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

It was getting late but I was determined at least to take a look at the game. Naturally there was another patch when I went to log in. Heaven forfend the version I'd downloaded would be the current one. That only took a few minutes, fortunately, and then there I was, in character creation.

I probably need to run through that again for another post at some point. It seemed to be a lot more detailed than the equivalent in MTAP but I couldn't take any screenshots to check because Steam's screenshot function doesn't seem to work in the game. Also, neither does FRAPS, although I didn't know thaat the time. For the shots in this post I was reduced to hitting PrtScrn and tabbing out to paste them into Paint.net.

My haste in rushing through character creation to get into the game proper also left me with a character I don't very much like the look of. Especially those weird lips. I might have to re-roll unless I can find an in-game makeover option.

Next came a short cut scene in which my character arrived in Sandrock by rail. The graphical quality immediately struck me as superior to MTAP although I probably ought to log back in to the older game to re-calibrate my impressions before making any rash statements. Sandrock certainly looks gorgeous, anyway.

There was barely time enough to meet the man who'd hired my character to come work in Sandrock as a Builder, following the retirement of the incumbent. I also met Mi-Ann, who's been employed for the exact same purpose as my character. Apparently it takes two women to do the work of one man in this town.

The retiring builder kindly left me his workshop although not any of his tools or crafting stations, other than a very basic workbench, so from here on in I'll be fixing up my own place as well as doing all chores the townsfolk can't be bothered to do for themselves. Same plot as the last game, in other words.

That was it for the first session but this afternoon I logged back in and spent another hour just exploring the town and talking to a few of the residents. Whereas Portia was a quasi-European market town, Sandrock looks more like a moderately prosperous railroad burg from the American West circa 1870 or so. It's a period I feel hasn't been done to death yet in gaming so I'm happy to see the change of setting.

As I was wandering about a small girl ran up to me and offered to give me a tour of the town. There was the option to refuse, claiming I already knew as much as I needed, but why hurt her feelings that way? I accepted and off she went at a dead run. Just as well each location was marked on the map because I kept losing sight of her as she disappeared over the brow of a hill or round a corner, teddy bear backpack bouncing along behind.

She talked a lot, too. The voice acting seems solid, if a little mannered, something I seem to remember was a feature of the first game. If I'm honest, I was fiddling around trying to take screenshots most of the time so I wasn't really paying attention to what she was saying. I'm sure I'll be able to work it all out for myself in due course.

After the tour I pottered around for a while, chatting to the locals and taking pictures. Before I knew it, the sun was down and a massive, desert moon was rising overhead. By the time I got back to my room in the workshop it was after midnight and the game was giving me dire warnings about what would happen if I wasn't in bed by three. I'd forgotten that part. 

Apart from the lack of a screenshot facility, about the only Early Access weirdness I noticed was that I couldn't find any way of quitting. I went through every menu option and key-bind but nowhere could I find any way to Exit or Log Out. In the end I had to tab out and close the game through Steam.

Oh, and a T-shirt turned up in the mail. A "Backer's T-Shirt". For people who backed the game on Kickstarter. I am almost certain I didn't do that. Did I?

Other than that everything was smooth as butter and just as delicious. I really like butter and I really like this series. Looking forward very much to getting stuck into both the story and the character progression. I'll report back on what I find but early impressions are very favorable..