First Impressions, Second Chances

As I was reading back yesterday's Lost Ark post it occured to me that I often finish ""First Impressions" by making some bold statement about whether I'm likely to go on playing the game and if so for how long. I started to wonder just how accurate predictions like that tend to be and whether you can really tell from the first session whether you'll play a game for days, weeks, months or years.

Luckily, for once I don't have to guess. I can go back and check. That's one reason for having a blog.

I've been reporting my opinions on new mmorpgs since the blog started in 2011 but it appears I first started using the "First Impressions" tag about six years ago, when I posted about my experiences in Blade and Soul. I've used it for expansions and game updates as well as full games but for the purposes of this excercise I'm limiting my research to new mmorpgs (Or games that have been widely treated as though they were mmorpgs.). Most of the conclusions were drawn from release builds but there are a handful of betas and early access reviews in there as well.

I expect I missed one or two but I think this is most of them. Almost thirty titles. For most of those I seem to have restrained myself to a single first impressions post, which I've linked. Some, Star Wars: the Old Republic and Atlas, for example, I seem to have managed to turn into "first impressions: the mini-series". For those I've linked to the post from which I took the quote.

Here, then, in reverse chronological order, is what I concluded about the games, often with a promise or a prediction about how likely I was to go on playing them. I've followed that with a few words saying whether I actually did. I'm curious to know if it reveals anything that might make me consider how to approach these posts in the future. Let's find out.

Chimeraland - January 11 2022 - "I can guarantee this won't be the last post about Chimeraland. I don't imagine for a moment it's going to be something I play the hell out of for years but equally I can already see it's going to keep me amused for at least as long as it take me to figure out what the hell is going on, which could be a while. " 

I think we all know which way that went. For a few weeks immediately after that post, Inventory Full became the unofficial home of the Chimeraland Fan Club or it certainly felt that way. There are seventeen posts tagged "Chimeraland" here already and that count is going to keep on climbing. I may not play for years but I also have no plans to stop.

Elyon - November 5 2021 - "Whether I'll log in again remains to be seen. I wouldn't say, as I did with Tera, "Thirty minutes is more than enough." but I have too many other, more appealing options right now. Maybe one day."

I don't think I ever did log in again. I remembered absolutely nothing about the game until I looked at the screenshots in the post and even then I couldn't remember much, not even if I still had it installed.. Turns out I played it via GeForce Now, which does at least mean I could log in on a whim at any time. I have no plans to do that, though.

Bless Unleashed - August 11 2021 - "I like Bless Unleashed and that's my first impression. What my last impression will be, who can say? But no-one ever does Last Impressions posts, do they?"

No, they don't. Maybe I should start but if I do it won't be with Bless Unleashed because I'm not done with it yet. Last summer I played it most days for a few weeks and thoroughly enjoyed it. I logged in for the winter holiday event and I often think of dropping in again. If it had a control system I liked better, I'd still be playing it regularly but it's too far towards the "action" end of the action mmo spectrum for me ever to feel really comfortable.

New World (Second Open Beta) - July 21 2021 - "It does feel as though Amazon might have got this one right. I guess we'll know for sure come September."

We sure did! Quoted for irony. 

Swords of Legends Online - June 20 2021 - "Chances are I won't buy Swords of Legend Online right away but chances also are I will buy it, sometime."

Hmm. This one's interesting. To me, anyway. Until I re-read this, I'd actually forgotten how much I enjoyed the game when I played it. I did almost pay the full box price, too. The only reason I held back was that, as you can see from the cluster of "First Impressions" posts dated June and July, there was a lot of competition last summer. I really need to install this and try it again, now it's gone free to play. And I would, if only there wasn't still too much else going on.

Phantasy Star Online 2: New Generation - June 12 2021 - "I can't imagine I'll be devoting much time to this one. I'll probably give it a couple more goes then put it quietly away. Don't let that put anyone else off, though. This is definitely the right game for someone. Just not for me".

And that's almost exactly what happened. It's a decent mmorpg but I don't like the controls and the exploration is too restricted. I gave it a fair shot but it didn't stick. I've uninstalled it now.

Crowfall (Open Beta) - June 4 2021 - "With the beta set to run for another couple of weeks it's quite likely I'll spend a fair few hours as a Crow. I wasn't anticipating that when I downloaded the game but I'm always happy to be pleasantly surprised by the confounding of my misapprehensions."

I played until I hit the level cap and posted about my experiences in the game several times. I was still playing, on and off, as long as the beta lasted but after I hit the cap there wasn't really much to do. I never saw anyone do any PvP the whole time I was there. I followed the desultory reports of its sputtering launch for a week or two and then forgot all about it.

Elteria Adventures -  June 2 2021 - "For an alpha this looks solid. I'll be more confident about that when I've seen more but it's a convincing start. "

I went back and played a few times but I ran out of new things to do and stopped. Development seems to have stalled. The Steam page says "There's no recent activity from the developers of this title..." I might look into that later.

Valheim - February 11 2021 - "I guess we can look forward either to dozens of posts, where I eat my words and bang on about the game to the point of delirium or to never hearing me mention it, ever again. It's going to be one of the two, I bet. I just can't tell which, yet."

Three hundred and eighty-one hours played and counting. Mmmm! Delicious words. Eat them all up! The game I didn't want to play and didn't like much when I did turned out to be the thing that took up almost all my free time for a couple of months. I haven't played much since but the upcoming update looks interesting enough to get me back for a few sessions.

Genshin Impact - October 2 2020 -  "Since the game is free to play and genuinely so as far as I can tell, I can't see any reason not to give it a try."

Another one I really didn't expect to like but which grabbed me by the scruff and wouldn't let go. I gave it a good run at launch and I've been back a couple of times. I had screenshots from GI rotating as my desktop background all the way up to last week, when I swapped the folder for Chimeraland. I'm not done with Genshin Impact yet but as always it's finding the time.

New World (First Open Beta) - "I like New World a lot. At the risk of breaking that earlier NDA I'll confirm I always did. It doesn't do anything you won't have seen before but everything it does, it does well. It's solid, entertaining, accessible and polished. What more do you want?"

It's fascinating how most of my posts about New World's various betas emphasize how solid, stable and polished it is. I wasn't alone in thinking that at the time. What the hell happened? Despite all the bugs and breakdowns and foot-shootings I played for several hundred hours and I will certainly add to that over the next year or two, always provided Amazon don't throw in the towel.

Black Desert Mobile - December 16 2019 - "I may be back. I may not."

I was not.

WoW Classic - August 27 2019 - "When I finish this post I'm going to log in and carry on so I guess I must be enjoying myself. I might do my Guild Wars 2 dailies first, though. And log in to Riders of Icarus. Oh, and go do the first of the new Panda quests in EverQuest II. I don't think there's anything going on in WoW Classic that can't wait."

I found this very surprising on a re-read. I'd forgotten how lukewarm I was about the whole WoW Classic project. I only played at all because everyone else was writing about it and I wanted to get a few posts out of it too. Then I found myself completely drawn in and played almost nothing else for a couple of months. Never did get to sixty, though. I might go back for WotLK Classic, if it happens and if Blizzard looks like a tenable proposition to give money to by then. I still wouldn't play one of their games at the moment but the day is obviously getting closer.

Secondhand Lands - July 3 2019 -  "It is, after all, exactly the sort of quirky, original take on the established format that many lovers of the genre have been asking for for years, while roundly ignoring its existence. It would be shame, having found it at last, to let it slip through my fingers simply because of a lack of patience on my part."

Yes, it would, wouldn't it? Do I feel ashamed? Yes, I do a little. I have been back several times but I think I finally need to accept that things that were fun twenty years ago may not be fun forever. No fault of the game, just recognizing an uncomfortable reality.

Star Wars :the Old Republic - April 22 2019 - "I have already decided to subscribe to TOR for a single month to bump my account up to "Preferred" status."

I played the hell out of SW:tOR for a couple of months and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's WoW in space, what's not to like? I didn't mean to stop, either. Something else was happening and I put it aside for a moment and never went back. I often think about logging in again and carrying on from where I left off but - broken record time - there's just too much happening in the genre right now to look back.

Atlas - January 5 2019 -  "I've enjoyed learning what Atlas is trying to be, but as a PvE MMO, right now it's pretty much a bust. It's still a co-op survival game under the hood and that's a genre that's never appealed to me, no matter how fancy the paint job."

Astonishingly, to me anyway, Steam says I only played Atlas for six hours. I got a lot of posts out of that short time and in my memory it feels like it was a lot longer. For a long time I thought about trying again but last week I finally accepted it was never going to happen. Uninstalled.

Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse - December 16 2018 - "As a taster for the eventual MMORPG I'm not sure it really tells us much (it doesn't even feature the "hybrid" combat I wanted to see) but at least it doesn't raise any red flags...yet."

OMG! Remember this one? The standalone AoC spinoff Intrepid spun up out of nowhere in the heat of the Battle Royale craze. That got them yelled at. A lot. I quite liked it. I played it several times, more than I've played any other Battle Royale game, and I would have played it more if anyone else had. I remember logging in one weekend for some fragging fun and finding literally no-one else there to kill or be killed by. Then it closed down and we all pretended it had never happened. Still waiting for my Kickstarter-pledged beta access to Ashes itself, of course. How many years is it now?

Bless Online - August 21 2018 -  "Bless is in no way going to change anyone's mind about anything. If you didn't like previous Korean MMOs you're not going to like this one... If you're easily amused, like me, though, it's definitely worth giving Bless a go. I'm sure there are a good few more hours in it for me and the odd blog post, too."

There were. I played for a couple of weeks and got my character into the mid-teens. Then I lost interest and stopped. Then the game shut down. I did like Bless but I like Bless Unleashed a lot more. I hope it lasts a lot longer.

 Legends of Aria - July 13 2018 - "Let's give it the benefit of the doubt for now. Open beta is due sometime later this year. I might take another look then. Or I might just skip it. I don't think it's really my sort of thing. Might be someone's, though."

Completely forgot I ever played this. I did not try the beta. I did skip it. I can't remember what happened to the game after that... Ah, I just checked and it's on Steam, free to play, with a "Mixed" reviw rating. I'm happy with my decision to pass.

 Warframe - July 19 2018 - "I do quite like it so far..."

A more honest reading would be "I tried to like it..." Warframe is obviously an excellent mmo and several people whose opinions I respect absolutely love it. I just found it awkward and often annoying, plus the character models are absolutely hideous. I gave up after half a dozen sessions. I don't expect to play again.

 Auteria - April 16 2018 - "I may well be back..." 

I was but only a couple of times. I still check in on the website occasionally to see if anything new's happening. It never is. It's still running, though. And I still have it installed.

Stash - January 9 2018 - "I don't know whether I'm going to find the time to invest in this one that it certainly requires and possibly deserves but it's tempting. It may look funny but it's a proper, real MMORPG and that's not nothing, not nowadays."

Reading this again was surreal. I remember Stash by name but if you'd asked me what kind of a game it was I'd have said some kind of tile-based puzzle title. I'd forgotten it was any kind of mmorpg, let alone a "proper, real" one. It's vaguely coming back to me now. I did play a few more times but not for long. I seem to remember it being quite difficult. And slow. That would tie in with the old school mmo thing, I guess. Maybe I should take another look.

Secret World Legends - June 26 2017 -  "I don't like it. The overarching impression I was left with was one of disrespect. The Secret World was a unique and original creation: this is just another bash 'em slash 'em F2P MMO. What a shame."

I might not have liked it but that didn't stop me playing it. I've played SWL plenty of times since then. I got as far as Egypt, I think. Certainly well into Blue Mountain. I also ended up preferring both the slightly-easier combat and the somewhat simpler mechanics of SWL over those of The Secret World, although I can't really say I felt the diference was as great as all that. Still always on the table, both of them, although I don't suppose I'll ever do more in either than play the odd session and take some screenshots. Best costume designs in any mmorpg, ever. Worth logging in just to change outfits.

Shroud of the Avatar - May 13 2017 - "Even after nearly three years in Early Access this does feel like an alpha not a beta. Pre-alpha might be over-egging it but it definitely feels like there's a long way to go."

It was rough. I wonder what it's like now? Not planning on finding out.

Revelation Online (Closed Beta 3) - January 2 2017 - "It's a step up from Riders of Icarus, on a par with Blade and Soul, and definitely worth a look if you like this sort of thing. If you don't like this sort of thing though I wouldn't bother. It's not going to change your mind"

What!? Have I been hacked? Revelation Online is better than Riders of Icarus and as good as Blade and Soul? Who says so? Me!? If so, why did I play both of those near-daily for months at a time but RO only for a handful of sessions when it launched? Okay, I can at least remember playing Revelation Online but I couldn't tell you anything about it, whereas I could chew your ear off with tales from RoI and B&S. 

Riders of Icarus - July 10 2016 - "Riders of Icarus is by no means a bad game or a bad MMO but with so many others to choose from I'd struggle to come up with a good reason to play it rather than something with a bit more soul."

Then again, this was 2016. It seems I've changed more in the last six years than I realised. These were my first impressions of Riders at launch and I didn't cotton much to it. When I came back for a second look a few years later I had a much better time. As I've said before, I might still be playing it now if it hadn't been for all that kerfuffle when the game changed hands and I got locked out for months. I am starting to wonder whether it might be a good idea to go back for another look at all the mmorpgs I said I didn't like, first time around. Not that there are many of them. I do seem to be very easily pleased.

Black Desert Online - March 8 2016 - "The world is inviting, the storyline is intriguing and the learning curve is satisfying.... At this early stage it's impossible to judge the stickiness but I think I'll get the box price out of this one, at least".

I did. And then some. I've played a lot of Black Desert, on and off and I'm far from done with it yet. I often think of BD, when I'm playing other games that remind me of it and wonder why I'm not playing BD instead. Black Desert doesn't need my recommendation, though. It's done rather well for itself.

Blade and Soul - February 1 2016 - "I don't get the feeling this is an MMO I'll pursue for long but I've thought that about a few Eastern conversions and ended up pottering around in them for a good while so who knows?"

Not me, obviously. For a while, probably right after I said I wouldn't be playing it for long, became my main back-up game, the one I played when I wasn't playing Guild Wars 2. I still play, occasionally. I have a character I like, I'm slowly leveling her up and it's only because other games keep interrupting that I never get very far. I still think Blade and Soul is one of the best of the imports and I've never really understood why it isn't more popular in the West.

And there we have it. All the first impressions from the last six years. I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn, other than if I say I don't much like a game it probably means I'll end up playing it for months. 

On that basis, I guess we should expect a lot more posts about Lost Ark.

Always Nothing Much To Say

For once this really might end up being one of those "short" posts I'm always promising. I don't have anything much I want to talk about but I didn't want to miss another day after I took Monday and Tuesday off while we took our first mini-holiday of the year. 

With the pandemic making proper travel far too unpredictable we're opting instead for random day trips with the odd overnight stay here and there thrown in as the mood takes us. On Monday we drove down to the south coast for a very enjoyable seaside break. The weather was positively Mediterranean, which made it very easy to imagine we'd gone somewhere more exotic.

It really was a short break although we packed so much in it felt a lot longer. We timed it all so neatly I  managed not to miss any of my dailies in Guild Wars 2. I did one lot around breakfast before we left and another just before bed when we got back. I suppose I could even have played an mmorpg while I was away - I have two or three installed on my Kindle Fire - but I didn't need much more entertainment than the sunset from our balcony.

Speaking of my Kindle Fire, it's starting to give me some concern. For the moment it will still take a charge, with a bit of fiddling about, but it likes to sit there bleating like a distressed sheep while it's doing it, something I find unreasonably disturbing. 

 

I tried several different chargers, one of which almost fried the whole thing, but eventually I discovered it's most likely the charging port beginning to fail, a very common design fault with Kindles. 

It's particularly annoying since I bought a Kindle quite specifically for the build quality, which I thought would be good. Certainly better than the several previous tablets I've had, some of which have developed faults on their own and the rest of which I've managed to break.

If I have to replace this one, I think the average lifetime of a tablet owned by me will dip below twelve months. I have a box of the things now. Some of them kind of work, in a way. Some are completely inert and I should throw them away. A couple could, theoretically, be repaired but since that would cost almost as much as the price of a new one it seems somewhat pointless.

It's getting to the stage where I do wonder if maybe I should just buy an iPad. The ridiculous upfront cost has always stopped me even considering it in the past but if I'd bought one as my first tablet it would probably still be working now. My iPod Touch is and that has to be at least ten years old. 

On the other hand, although the iPod hardware lasts forever, it's been a long time since anything much would run on it. The most recent version of iOS my Touch can use is so out of date there's barely an app left that will accept it.

 

But enough of my problems. Let's talk about Crowfall's. And Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis's. 

I imagine I'll have something more to say when Crowfall launches three weeks from now but for the time being I'm done with it. I found it a very strange experience indeed. As I wrote, I kind of enjoyed myself even as I was thinking what I was doing was utterly pointless. And quite possibly stupid.

The extended tutorial takes you all the way to the soft cap at Level 30. I believe you can do five more levels after that but to do so involves a bizarre necromantic practice by which you dig up body parts to upgrade your "Vessel", the disposable entity you've probably been thinking of as "my character". That's a habit you're going to have to break.

With increasing effort I pushed through to thirty. The entirely linear questline takes you just about that far although I did have to kill a few extra mobs along the way to fill out a few small gaps. It was fairly painless. Xp for mob-killing is decent and the sacrifice mechanic, where you throw items you've looted from mobs into a fire, gives significant bonuses.

At thirty the game sends you to the zones that used to be a separate world called the Infected, a tripartite Realm vs Realm set-up similar to so many others. As many people have observed, good luck finding anything to do there. I ran around for an hour or so and saw one other player. And he was on my team.

When I went to Reddit to see if other people were finding the whole thing as weird and ill-judged as I was (they were) I found many cynics recommending ignoring the quest line completely and just grinding mobs from the get-go. 

 

Apart from one or two obvious white knights, the near-universal opinion seems to be that the New Player Experience is about as useless as it could possibly be. It determinedly trains players to expect an on-rails PvE questing experience and then throws them into a game with literally no quests of any kind, where almost the entire gameplay consists of fighting other players. It would be disorienting enough if there were any other players to fight. It's completely mystifying when there are none.

The general theory appears to bethat the dev team, having given up any hope of making the game they were originally planning, settled for bolting something they could manage on the front and leaving it at that. I have no idea where the truth lies but I'm going to say right now that I can't see how this game is going to find any kind of audience after launch, much less make any money.

PSO2:NG is having very much the opposite problem. As MassivelyOP put it today, when they reported on the apologies and compensation coming to players very soon, "having so many players that it’s hard to play isn’t a bad problem to have". 

The lag that's had Sega handing out the goodie bags hasn't affected me at all. I'm not sure I noticed it even once. I was playing in EU hours on the east coast NA server but even so there were loads of people around and everything was silky-smooth all the time. 

I haven't played much since the last time I posted but I do keep thinking about it. I was trying to work out how I could have wrung the small amount of pleasure out of Crowfall that I did and it came to me that I just want a good, old-fashioned mmorpg leveling experience right now. It seems like a while since I last had a new character I cared about in a new game I didn't already know pretty well.

For the reasons I gave in the first impressions posts, PSO2:NG isn't going to be a game I devote a lot of time to but it might just have to stand in for that game until a more suitable one comes along. That might be Bless Unleashed, which I find myself almost pining for after my brief beta exposure, or I guess it could be New World.

Amazon are really priming the pre-launch pump right now, with press releases and lore and gameplay videos aplenty. It's all having an odd effect on me. I find myself less and less excited at the prospect of playing, not least because the game seems to be lining itself up to be the next Elder Scrolls Online, a game I never really got on with all that well.

I have an uncomfortable feeling New World is going to end up being one of those games I'll harp on about having been "so much better in beta". Not because it was better, of course, but because it was smaller, more manageable and less overwhelming. 

Really, all I liked doing there was exploring, gathering and fighting zombies. It was extremely atmospheric and very relaxing. I can't say the prospect of a full-on quest-hub exprience with instanced dungeons was what I imagined I'd be getting when I pre-ordered. 

Still, I'd sooner have that than what the poor sods who pre-ordered Crowfall are going to get, that's for sure!

Movin' Too Fast: PSO2:NG First Impressions Pt. 2.

When I came to look at the screenshots I'd taken for this, the second part of my Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis First Impressions post, I was a little taken aback to find how few there were to choose from. That could have meant one of two things: either I'd found the game so bland or downright unpleasant to look at I hadn't want to take any pictures or I'd been so engaged with what I was doing I hadn't thought to.

It was the second. PSO:NG isn't the most beautiful of games but it's definitely not an eyesore. The textures are a little strange, with that peculiarly scratchy feel that seems to be endemic to a certain kind of generic spaceworld setting but there's no shortage of striking views and spectacular scenery. 

I had plenty of time to appreciate that as I spent an hour or so exploring the hinterlands of the small central city. I was looking for things I could kill to grind a little xp. I'd stalled on the main quest sequence at a stage requiring a specific "Battle Power". That was literally the quest: "Achieve a Battle Power of 830 or greater".

I was already quite close. The obvious way to heave myself over the line seemed to be to level up. If I'd been able to find anything to kill it might have worked, too. Why I couldn't still puzzles me somewhat.

A handy pop-up appears every time you cross a zone line telling you what the new area is called and what Battle Power would be best to take on the challenges you might find there. The area immediately outside the city was flagged for BP 800. It sounded perfect. 

Shopkeep! Service!

 

It wasn't. All the mobs I could find were either Level 1 or Level 15. Absolutely nothing in between. At level five as I was, the low ones gave me almost no xp while the high ones killed me in a couple of hits. After I'd worked my way all around the city walls with no success I decided on a change of plan.

First I went shopping. I had a stroll around the city, looking at all the mechants. There were quite a few.

PSO2:NG has a penchant for interactions with NPCs for many of its systems and mechanics. Part of the tutorial introduces you to the game's method for upgrading weapons and armor. It's not crafting as such. I believe there is crafting in the game but no friendly NPC has popped up to tell me about it yet. 

The upgrade system involves merging similar items with the one you want to upgrade while using another item as a catalyst. To access the interface you need to go to an NPC. I had a few swords left over from the quest that explained the mechanic but I didn't think I had enough. I found a vendor who sold them and bought some more. While I was browsing I spotted a better sword than the one I was using so I bought that as well.

There was a small crowd at the stall where the NPC who ran the upgrade franchise was standing. I shouldered my way to the front and got to work. The first batch of swords didn't get me quite over the line but I threw in the one I had equipped, which I'd already upgraded for the tutorial. That did the trick.

It sounds fussy but I found it engaging. I don't know if later developments allow you to perform these kinds of operations through the UI but I kind of hope not. Going to a specific location in a city or outpost, be it an NPC or a crafting station, is something that eventually loses its appeal but in the early stages of learning a game I find it works well to create a bond between player and world.

Summer re-runs.

And it's quite a nice world, at least when the DOLLS aren't trying to blow it up. The small central city is a pleasant place to hang out between missions. I love the wall screens that show the opening cinematic from the game itself. That's a very clever touch. I stood and watched the whole thing play. It was a lot better without the music.

Ah, the music. Let's deal with that now the subject's come up. I rarely switch background music off completely in mmorpgs. I often turn it down so it really is in the background, where it ought to be but I still like to know it's there. 

Not so with PSO2:NG. I have heard plenty of worse tunes but few that distracted me as much. After the third or fourth time I found myself unable to concentrate even with the music turned down to a normal level, I turned it all the way down to not much more than a murmur. I doubt I'll be turning it back up.

Getting back to the city, I noticed an appealing bar with outdoor seating and plenty of benches. It's a shame there's no mechanic to let you sit down on any of them but that's something most developers don't see as a priority. 

The ability to sit on chairs is often touted as a sign a game wants to be thought of as roleplay-friendly. PSO2:NG doesn't immediately strike me as a game made with roleplayers in mind. Then again, it does have what feels like some solid lore behind it and the series has been running for a long time, so I'm probably talking through my hat here.

Oh, I wish I hadn't mentioned hats. I still haven't found a way to take mine off. I don't believe there is one. I'd re-roll but I'm not convinced this is a game I'll stick with long enough for it to matter. The reason for that is the combat. 

The only combat shot I was able to take and even then it's after the fight.

 

Not that the combat system is bad. It isn't, not at all. On the contrary, it's very good. Far too good for me. Even in the tutorial, fighting involves all kinds of special moves and extra key presses. When the game's trying to explain elemental weaknesses and specific location targeting at level five you know you're supposed to be taking the fighting seriously.

Combat training in mmorpgs tutorials is usually a formality. Hit this target dummy three times so we know you can tell which mouse button is which. Kill three goblins who probably couldn't beat you in an arm-wrestling contest if you took all of them on at once.

Not so here. I died several times in various combat trials during the tutorial. One instance went so badly I gave up and logged out - not in a fit of pique but because it was the only way I could find to reset the thing and start again. 

I had similar problems with some of the movement training. PSO2:NG is hyper-kinetic. You can run, glide, jump, double-jump, wall-jump... And you have to demonstrate your skills in all of them before the main quest will let you carry on. 

It took me a few tries to get a passing grade. The wall jump I found particularly challenging. It wasn't frustrating, though. It was fun. Part of the reason I spent so long running around the city was because I was experimenting with my movement skills and enjoying the freedom they afford.

There's even a side quest to climb to the top of a very high mountain. I took that and then wished I hadn't, at least for a while. But I persisted and eventually I found myself way up in the clouds with a solid sense of a job well done. It felt more somewhere between the sheer joy of climbing in Genshin Impact and the grim satisfaction of finishing a jumping puzzle in Guild Wars 2.

I've come across exotic movement and kinetic combat in other mmorpgs. The thing about PSO2:NG that makes it different is the way it rams both of them together. It took me a while to figure it out but the reason I couldn't kill some of the DOLLS I was faced with in missions turned out to be because I was naively determined to keep my feet on the ground.

Did they recast the Flash again?

 

Double-jumping and wall-jumping in combat seems to let you hang in the air for ages and ages. Fighting massive monsters involves using them like a springboard then pummeling them around the head and shoulders like a frenzied hawk. Or it does when I'm playing. Other times you need to be spinning them round and round so you can smack the weak spot in their back or running between their legs to stab them in the foot.

It's fast and furious and a lot of fun but it's also a lot of finger-work. I can handle it for a few minutes but the idea of keeping it up for a session is terrifying. And of course I ought also to be putting combos together and exploiting weaknesses and generally making good use of all my ever-growing bag of tricks.

That's not going to happen. I can barely hold my own with a big DOLL at level six. There's no hope of me being able to play the game at the higher levels, not even the easy solo stuff. Well, probably not. I guess I'll find out as I go along.

If I stick around, that is. I don't imagine I will. Compared to what seems to be expected of me here, other action-oriented games like Black Desert Online or Genshin Impact seem positively restful. 

My overriding first impression of PSO2:NG is that it's a strong, solid, entertaining game. It has excellent combat that I'm sure many people will absolutely love. Neither the graphics nor the story look set to win any awards for originality but the game looks good enough to justify spending long periods staring at it and it has a story that seems to be about as coherent and comprehensible as you'd expect. As an imported game, the translations are excellent and the voice acting (of which there doesn't seem to be all that much) is convincing. The UI is a little idiosyncratic but it works.

All in all I'd give it a solid B+ from the little sliver I've seen. As I said, I don't think it's really my sort of thing and I do have a lot of other mmorpgs to choose from, old and new, so I can't imagine I'll be devoting much time to this one. I'll probably give it a couple more goes then put it quietly away.

Don't let that put anyone else off, though. This is definitely the right game for someone. Just not for me.

Burning Down The House: Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis - First Impressions

There is such a thing as too much fun. Right now I'm struggling to keep up with the torrent of game releases, open betas and free weekends. It almost seems as if there's a new announcement every day. It's one thing to stay on top of the news, quite another to take advantage of the opportunities.

Just this morning, when I logged into Steam, I ran straight into another: five-days of Fallout '76 for free. It's a game I've never considered buying, although this would be the ideal time. It's on sale at 66% off. 

I've read enough blog posts about it to be curious enough to take a run around for free, though, so I dithered my pointer over the "Play Game" button for a few seconds before getting a grip. I do not have time for this. No, really, I don't.

The current glut of new games highlights a curious irony in the way I've engaged with the mmorpg genre since I started blogging about it nearly ten years ago. Way back in 2012, when the blog was fresh and new (well, new, anyway), when I was still in the process of leading all my hobbyhorses out of the stables and riding them around for everyone to admire, I wrote a whole post on how I don't like tutorials. And what have I done ever since?

Review tutorial after tutorial, that's what. I play a lot of new mmorpgs and write a lot of First Impressions pieces but half the time the tutorial is pretty much as far as I get before I lose interest and wander away. 

Judging by the costumes you start with, I'm guessing there's a cash shop full of outfits.

 

I was thinking about it this morning. I could quite feasibly start a blog where all I did was review tutorials. Most tutorials are good for a couple of posts; some can be stretched a good deal further than that. Throw in a few YouTube playthroughs and I probably wouldn't need to find more than a couple of games a month to sustain a regular posting schedule of two or three posts a week.

I don't in fact intend to start a second blog right this moment and if I did it would not be all tutorials all the time. If I did, though, I'd call it "Press WASD To Move". Who the hell would want to read it is another question but that's never been much of a concern here. 

Just as well because "here" is where all those tutorial reviews are going to keep turning up. Look! Here comes another! Brace yourselves.

Today's example comes courtesy of Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis. Like Fallout '76, this is a game I never intended to play. I remember being very mildly curious about the original Phantasy Star Online many, many years ago, mostly because mmorpgs were a lot rarer back then and PSO was not easily accessible to Western players.

I was never curious enough to do anything about it, though, and by the time the sequel appeared I'd all but forgotten the game existed. It was only when PSO2 received a very belated Western release last year that I began to pay it a modicum of attention. I probably wouldn't even have given it that much, had Belghast and one or two others not blogged about it a few times.

PSO2 scarcely had time to bed in before PSO2:NG arrived to replace it. The relationship between the two rests somewhat obscurely in the hinterland between sequel, expansion and revamp. I'll leave that discussion to someone more familiar than I with what came before. I'm just going to talk about what I've seen for myself.

Manon strikes me as a character with something of a backstory.

 

I played PSO2:NG yesterday for three and a half hours. That's a clue in itself as to how I felt about it. Three and a half hours is quite a long time to play a brand new game fresh out of the box. Developers used to cite statistics suggesting players often take not much more than a tenth of that time to make up their minds. 

When you consider the game uses a control system that would never be my first choice, has a setting that's never been one of my favorites, has scrappy, scratchy textures that generally feel slightly abrasive on the eye and, perhaps most tellingly of all, demands a level of skill to play effectively that I simply don't possess, the very fact that I stuck at it for almost four hours is probably all I need to say.

Yeah, that's not going to happen. I'm going to give chapter and verse on why I played for as long as I did and why it's more likely than not I'll go back and play some more.

The game opens with a swooping introductory video which I didn't watch because the music was so loud I was scrabbling for some way to make it stop. Once I'd sorted that out I had to pick a "Ship", a neat conceit for a space-opera game to use for servers, before it was on to the main event: Character Creation.

You can make two characters for free. If you played the previous version you can import that character. There are four races, all basically human, although only one is actually called "Human". Of the other three, one is a human in a mech suit, another is a human with horns and the third is a human with long ears. You can call that last one an elf if you want.

Like Crowfall, PSO2:NG neatly sidesteps any gender stereotyping by not referring to gender at all. The choice here is Humanoid Type 1 or Humanoid Type 2. It's going to be very interesting to see how this develops. I wonder if having just two choices is going to present a problem in the future, no matter what those choices are called.

Where did you get that hat, where did you get that hat?

 

There are plenty of options but the very first is a choice between three "Base Characters". DO NOT TAKE THIS LIGHTLY! I did and it was a bad, bad mistake. I picked the one with the funny hat because it lreminded me of the hat Michael Jackson used to wear when he was about twelve years old and I thought it would be funny. 

So far I have not been able to find any way to take the hat off! As far as I can tell it's glued to my character's head. She can change her hairstyle but she can't take off her hat. It's space magic of the worst kind. If I carry on playing I am going to have to re-roll because I cannot go through life, even virtual life, looking like that.

It gets worse. I spent a long time fiddling with the many sliders trying to get my character to look just right. I was pleased with what I saw in the editor but when I saw the same character standing next to the first two NPCs I realized what I'd done: I'd made her face as round as an apple. 

Compared to every other character I've since seen in game, NPC or player, mine looks inert. I'm not sure why, exactly, but her face neither moves nor has definition. If she could take her hat off I'd redo her - you get five hours to make changes for free, after which you have to pay - but the options available don't let you go back as far as the Basic Character. 

All in all I'd say Character Creation in PSO:NG is good but not great. There are a lot of options and you can make a reasonably diverse range of appearances but the controls are not always intuitive and mistakes are easy to make. Of course I may be bitter because that hat.

The game begins with a cut scene. I watched that and then I started playing with the graphics. You can actually do this in character creation but I was too excited to think of it then. I go a bit peculiar when I get my hands on a new character creator.

Mindful of my experience in Crowfall, I checked what default setting the game had given me.

Well, that seems harsh! Over the course of the next few hours I gradually ratcheted my graphics upwards until by the time I logged out they were on Super. The game looked better and better and my performance remained exactly the same. 

Movement was smooth and fluid, there was no hitching or stuttering, nothing flickered or glitched. The entire time I played everything felt as smooth as butter and just as sweet. Even when I arrived in the main city and there were other players everywhere my frame rate remained the same and I had no graphical or performance problems of any kind.

About the only difference I could tell was the fan on my graphics card had to do some work. Most times I play most games you can't even hear it. I checked the temperature and it was more than fine. I'm forced to assume whatever algorithm the game is using to determine appropriate settings is either ultra-conservative or just broken.

With that sorted it was time for action. In short order I learned how to move, jump, glide, fight and open boxes. My character and her two companions met, fought and defeated a DOLL, the game's oddly-named prime enemy. It was a good fight. We won. Then half a dozen more DOLLS arrived and a big, musclebound oaf with a bare chest leapt in to save us.

 

Here I am to save the day!

I confess I took against him. And the game, for a moment. It seemed so retrograde a scenario, the plucky but barely competent girls being rescued from the big bads by a brawny boy. I still think it's ill-judged but the revelation that the man was the father of one of my companions and the mentor of the other, along with his concern for his as-yet untrained daughter did give some ameliorating context.

As things progressed my concerns withdrew a little. The writing, while in no way original, is better than merely competent. There are some nuances. The voice acting is variable but the actor playing the big fellow makes him seem genuinely concerned rather than merely overbearing. Conversely, the other Meteorn (Just go with it. It'll take too long to explain.), my second female companion, turns out to be oddly reticent and uncertain. After a while I could see why intervention might have been deemed necessary. The three of us really wouldn't have been able to handle all those DOLLS.

After that it was on to the usual introductions. The big man, subverting his stereotype, went off to cook us all dinner, while I wandered around the village introducing myself to the locals, doing them favors and getting a series of short instructive lectures in return. It was jolly restful. I should have known what was coming.

I'd get those drinks down you while you have the chance...

The evening concluded with a cookout and dance party on the beach. With horrifying inevitability my host declared his intention to make absolutely certain no harm ever befell his paradisaical home or its innocent inhabitants... whereupon a vast portal ripped the sky apart and a fleet of spacecraft screamed across the bay, disgorging an army of DOLLS, which set up on the revelers with grim abandon.

We fought them. We beat them back. Then a gigantic spaceship like one of the Easter Island heads blown up to the size of a small moon arrived and began razing every building in the village to the foundations with blazing blue laser beams. 

My character and her two friends were told to run for the caves and we didn't need to be told twice. I could see we were so far out of our league we didn't even deserve to be carrying the oranges for half time. The big guy seemed to think he could handle it. I had my doubts. I was right, he was wrong.

Uh oh! That can't be good...

The first part of the tutorial ended with everyone but my character and her two companions either dead or missing, the village destroyed and a general sense that the world as we'd known it was at an end. Just like the end of every other Tutorial Pt. 1 in other words. This is literally the same basic plot as used by Blade and Soul, Bless Unleashed, Guild Wars, Allods Online... 

It gets used over and over because it works. At least, it does when it's done well. It establishes a connection between the player, their character and the world that feels comfortable, pleasant, desirable, welcome... and then it rips almost all of that away, leaving the player feeling something's been lost that they want back. 

Do it too well and you get pre-Searing Ascalon, a five level tutorial a whole load of players moved heaven and earth to keep alive forever. Do it badly and you get Rift, a confusing mess almost everyone hates. PSO2:NG does get it just about right, although I did come out of the far end wondering just how the hell the planet was going to survive.

No-one's walking out of that.

 

That's not the end of the tutorial but it's the end of this post. I think I was only Level Two when I came out of the first phase and the next introduces a whole bunch of movement and combat concepts that I barely managed to understand let alone perfect. I was Level Five by the time I got through that section and it deserves a post of its own.

Whether it will get one depends what else happens between now and Monday. We're going away for a couple of days at the start of the week so there probably won't be any posts here after the weekend. If I don't get the second part of this First impressions piece done before then it's going to be too late to bother.

In case that happens I'll say now that I was quite impressed with Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis. I don't think it's the game for me for quite a few reasons but I would bet it's going to be the game for somone. It's well-made and it has a good feel about it. 

Of course, I have only seen the tutorial, but I've seen a lot of those and I've seen plenty worse.

Bullet Time

There was no post here yesterday because I had to take my mother to the eye hospital to have a cataract removed. That went well but I didn't get home until just before dark so I thought I'd skip a day. 

It's only the sixth I've missed this year. Probably some kind of record. I'm not really sure. I find I'm less and less interested in statistics where the blog's concerned. In the early years I used to pore over them obsessively but as time went on my interest waned, partly because I felt they were becoming less and less reliable but mostly because I realized I just didn't care much any more.

That drift has started to accelerate recently to the extent that I began googling for ways to turn google analytics off. Oh, the irony! Didn't find any, either. 

I could just not look at them, of course. I was down to no more than a five minute glance at the monthly report but then Google started sending me emails. Quite snippy, they are, telling me things are wrong with my blog and I damn well ought to do something about them  because I'm letting the side down. At least that's how I take them. It might just be me.

At first I tried to comply with their peremptory demands but after a while I got irritated and looked into what might happen if I didn't. Apparently my rankings would slip and the blog might not show up in searches any more.

So be it. I think it's probably too late to worry about that now. If my intent had ever been to attract random page views I pretty much scuppered any hope when I started to insist on using incomprehensible and utterly irrelevant titles for almost every post. I even dropped the little coda I used to use saying which game a post was about because I felt it detracted from my obscurantist aesthetic.

I am planning on adjusting some of that attitude later this year. Indeed, I've already started, although more informative titles are about as far as I'm likely to take it. I am not going to be digging into the html code Blogger generates to correct the perceived anomalies that unsettle Google's crawlers. I would suggest that since Google owns both of them they might want to do it themselves if they're that bothered.

And with that passive-aggressive opening (alright, just aggressive) it's on to the meat of the post. Except there isn't any meat to speak of. More like a few table scraps. I have a few teeny-tiny topics that barely merit a paragraph, let alone a post. Time to break out the bullet points.

 

• Welcome to the neighborhood.
  

The EverQuest franchise has a new Community Manager. Since I thought it was worth a mention when the old one left I guess I ought to extend the same courtesy to the new one now he's here. His name is Accendo and yes, he is a he. Someone asked and he said so. 

Both the threads (old game and new) pour yet more praise on the departed Dreamweaver while putting pressure on the new guy to step up and follow his lead. Based solely on the answers Accendo gives I suspect that pressure will be resisted but we'll see.

• Oops! I missed one.
  

There was (at least) one obvious name missing from my recent list of mmorpgs to look out for this summer: Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis. Really trips off the tongue, doesn't it? Then again, probably better than Phantasy Star Online 2.5, which is what it seems to be.

I really wasn't interested at all in PSO2 (much neater) when it finally made its long-overdue debut in the West last year. Belghast wrote about it several times and it neither sounded nor looked like anything I'd want to play so I didn't bother. The revamped version looks considerably more interesting. It's been given a complete graphical revamp and from screenshots it looks orders of magnitude better. The old quests and combat have been completely replaced and the game now has a proper open world. I'm still not sure it's for me but at least now it looks interesting enough that I want to find out for sure.

It's available on Steam, although it's a huge download, just shy of 100GB. I have it all set up and ready to go so expect an ignorant, uninformed and highly inaccurate first impressions piece any day now.

 

• Dust on the lens.
  

Shintar queried in the comments whether I had my graphics settings for Crowfall turned down to the minimum. I said I'd check next time I logged in so I did and I had. 

Not my choice. I usually allow a new game to choose its own settings but if things look odd I go in and fiddle about. Crowfall didn't look odd, just bland. When I checked, though, I'd been assigned the lower of two settings: Basic. That didn't sound good. The only other option was Medium, which didn't sound much better. 

I swapped to Medium and it made a surprising amount of difference. There was nothing the higher definition could do about the exceptionally bland and undetailed design but it did do plenty for the lighting and the textures as should be evident from the screenshots. I'm guessing there are settings above Medium. There'd have to be, wouldn't there, or else you couldn't really call it "Medium". I assume the game has checked my aging hardware and decided anything higher would be a fire hazard. Probably best to bear that in mind whenever I say anything uncomplimentary about Crowfall's graphics from now on.

• How much?!

I took the hint and thought about upgrades. I forget how long ago I bought this PC but it could have been five years. It might even be more than that. And it was low mid-range then. Given the kind of games I play, though, it's very much more than adequate and I haven't seen much reason to change anything.

Until now. It's not so much that time's catching up with me. It's more that there are finally some new games I'd like to play coming on stream and they have recommended specs significantly higher than anything I can match. I probably should do something about it before I can't even meet the minimum specs.

With that in mind I went to look at new CPUs and graphics cards. I specifically bought a PC that's easy to upgrade with the intention of doing just that rather than replacing the entire thing. What I wasn't expecting was that I'd be able to replace the entire rig for scarcely more than the cost of the two key components. I'm not sure how that works but it makes me think I might as well soldier on as I am until the time comes to scrap the whole thing and start over.

And maybe Crowfall's an exception, anyway. New World's coming later in the summer. I never had any problems with that in the betas. It ran smoothly and looked amazing. If the release build does the same I think I'm fine for now. If not, I guess I'm going to have to spend some serious money.

 

• Garbage In, Garbage Out

In common with many of us, the Nosy Gamer has been wondering whether Final Fantasy XIV on its  way up might have passed World of Warcraft on its way down. As part of the evidence he referenced a website I hadn't heard of before: MMO Populations. 

I've always been interested in specifics on how many people play certain games but the methodology employed didn't inspire confidence: "By combining online social activity, sentiment tracking, public statistics, rankings and more MMO Populations estimates the total subscribers, players and active daily players for the top MMOs". Still, I thought it was worth a look.

I didn't spend very long on it. By the time I'd scanned through the "big list" of more than a hundred mmorpgs I'd seen as much as I wanted. 

The list includes several of my all-time favorites, including Vanguard, City of Steam and Fallen Earth as well as some I wish I'd been able to play, like EverQuest Online Adventures and others I yet hope to play, like Pantheon and Ashes of Creation. You'll notice all of those either closed down years ago or haven't yet been made available for general play.

According to the list Vanguard "is estimated to have 42,600 total players or subscribers". The detail does say that this month's estimate for daily players is zero but if you mouse over the graph on the same page, for June 2021 the figure is 1209. Even if they were polling the emulator, the most people I've ever seen logged on at once didn't hit double digits.

As for City of Steam ("estimated to have 4,865 total players or subscribers") 462 people supposedly logged in this week. Logged in to what is the question. As far as I know there isn't even a private server for City of Steam and believe me I've looked. I'd be playing on it if there was.

There are lots more fascinating facts where those came from. I'm sure I feel far more confident about Pantheon's prospects, for example, now I know that "12,484 people play per day, with a total player base of 1,314,070." Go have a dig for yourself. It's very entertaining.

 

And that will have to do for now. I have a feeling there were other burning issues of the day I was going to be flippant about but I can't remember what they were and anyway I want to go try Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis. Or PSO:NG as I'm happy to call it. It's  nice to say out loud, too, so long as you sound the "P". Otherwise you're just saying "song" and that's very weird.

Next week and the week after that I'm officially on holiday, although since I'm still furloughed the only material difference from every other week this year will be twenty per cent more in my pay packet. We've abandoned any plans for foreign travel in 2021 but I will be taking a day or two out of my busy schedule of staying home playing video games to go visit some interest spots a little farther afield than normal. 

We might even stay overnight. If so, that will almost certainly mean a few more missed posts, although maybe "missed" isn't exactly the right word. I'm fairly confident it'll take more than a few days of me not posting for anyone to start "missing" anything.