Crowns And Pawns: Completed

Here's a rare event. I finished a game! Yes, I know. Doesn't happen very often, does it? And even more unicornly, it's a game I wishlisted after playing the demo in a Next Fest. And then I bought it. And now I've played it. Seriously. What are the chances?

The game is  

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit   

Inevitably, it's a point and click adventure, very much in the classic style. The demo reminded me strongly of the Broken Sword series, which I consider to be the gold standard for the genre. I'm always on the lookout for games that follow closely in that tradition, which is why I wishlisted it. 

The weird thing, though, is that when I reviewed the demo back in February of '22, I wasn't all that enthusiastic. In my summing-up, I described it as "...quite bland... adventure gaming by numbers" and concluded "... if it turned up for free on Amazon Games or Epic or somewhere like that... I'd probably play it.... I'm not sure I'd pay money for it, though."

But I did. I payed £8.49 for it on Christmas Day 2023. I can't remember buying it but given the purchase date I suspect I got a Steam Gift Card or similar for Christmas that year. Don't remember that either. In the same purchase I also bought Tails Noir: Preludes, which I've started but haven't finished. Maybe I'll get back to that one next.

Crowns and Pawns took me just under eight hours to complete, which works out at about a pound an hour. Looked at objectively, it's not great value. It's cheap enough, sure, but I've played Star Resonance: Blue Protocol for almost exactly as long and it hasn't cost me anything. 

I pick on that one specifically because I was playing it in between sessions of Crowns and Pawns and enjoying it just as much but I could name-check any F2P title, really. Is it any wonder smaller studios struggle to get attention for games when they have to charge money for them and there's so much of equal or higher quality available for free?

But... there are no major Free to Play publishers pumping out endless, throwaway point and click adventures. Not that I know of, anyway, although if there are any, I'd love to hear about them. For the dedicated teams hammering away at all those intractable puzzles and coming up with endless streams of witty one-liners, I guess the main problem would be all those giveaways from Amazon Prime Gaming. Prime seems determined to hoover up every P&C game ever made and hand it out for free to bulk out the ever-decreasing value of their offer.

 

Except, like having a show that goes into syndication back in the golden age of network television, having your five or ten year-old adventure game picked up by Prime or Epic might be the payday the developers were always hoping for. How much do they get, I wonder?

It seems the actual numbers are safely tucked away behind NDAs but this reddit thread, which includes a couple of replies supposedly from developers who've taken the shilling, suggests it's a flat fee upfront with some sort of payment for new accounts registered (In the case of Epic.). Whatever it is, for most of the aging adventure games I claim, it has to be a bonus. None of them are going to be generating much in the way of new sales by now.

So, was Crowns and Pawns any good? Yes, it was, thank-you for asking. 

I didn't like the opening, which had nothing much to do with the rest of the game. I can see why they didn't use it for the demo. If they had, I'd never have wishlisted it, let alone bought it. I disliked it so much, I stopped playing after I finished it and didn't pick the game up again for more than a year.

I suppose out of politeness I should insert a spoiler warning here. Like anyone cares...

The game begins with that peculiar "Prologue" set in Chicago, in which Milda, the protagonist, and her friend and roomate Dana, meet some annoying jerk about some job Dana is trying to get. There's a whole lot of infuriating business where you have to stop a busker from playing, get some guy a drink, print out fliers and pack your bags, none of which I found remotely amusing or entertaining and all of which seemed to take fucking forever.

Having played the whole thing now, I can see it's supposed to be giving you some backstory to Milda and Dana's relationship, setting her friend up to be a useful contact later in the game, but why it all needs to be presented in such a tedious fashion beats me. It feels like a different game altogether and a much less enjoyable one.

Once you get past that, though, the remaining 90% of the game is pure adventure. Milda arrives at her dead grandfather's cottage in Lithuania (Big spoiler - he's not really dead!), all of which you can read about in that demo review I linked earlier because the demo is pretty much that whole chapter.

From there the action moves to the capital, Vilnius, then to Belarus (To fix the result of an ice-hockey game.) and then to Siena in Italy. All with trips back to Vilnius in between. You get to see a lot of Europe, some views of which, particularly the many churches you have to break into along the way, look to have been taken directly from life. 

There's a lot of business with seals (The kind you use to put wax on documents, not the ones that honk horns in the circus - if you live in the 19th century.), codes, invisible ink, secret compartments... all the good stuff you expect from the genre. You have to read old books and look at old pictures and compare this with that and come to conclusions.

All of which requires a considerably more robust and coherent UI than the one you're given. I ended up using a walk-through quite a bit. I almost always knew what to do, I just couldn't figure out how to make the game do it. Often the way with these things, I find.

Some of the mechanics seem to get forgotten along the way, like the notes function on Milda's phone, which you sometimes use to combine facts you've discovered so as to learn something new but which mostly just seems to sit there, doing nothing. Or maybe I missed a bunch of stuff. That's always possible.

If so, it wasn't anything that got in the way of finishing the story, which ends in ludicrously dramatic fashion with a seismic collapse in a cave beneath the vaults of a church in Vilnius. The game begins like an episode of a failed sitcom starring two wacky girls just out of college and ends like the climax of an Indiana Jones movie. It's a bit of a leap.

One thing I did like about the ending is that you get the choice of grabbing the eponymous, extremely valuable and possibly magical but also allegedly cursed crown or letting it fall into the abyss, to be forever lost. I chose to let it go, which gave me an achievement only 17% of players have got, so I'm guessing greed wins out for most people there. Or possibly megalomania. 

The whole plot feels far from convincing throughout. There's something about KGB psychotronic experiments and a history professor who wants to rule the world using telepathy. There's a hint of magic that could just be an over-active imagination and an awful lot of quite detailed historical information concerning the Baltic States. Religion comes into things a lot and so does architecture, not to mention the rules of ice-hockey. It's all quite educational.

Mostly the puzzles are logical and realistic - for the genre. There are a couple of annoying "action" sequences involving precise timing that I could have done without. Also, if you're going to require a librarian to go to the far end of a library to retrieve a book so Milda can do something while she's away, I'd suggest not making that book the Necronomicon. That was one I had to use the walk-through for because I assumed it was a joke. 

Speaking of jokes, they're pretty good, on the whole. I wasn't rolling around but I did chuckle a few times. Milda and Dana have several good exchanges and Milda's friend Joris, at whose apartment in Vilnius she stays (Nothing happens between them, or not in my play-through it didn't, anyway.) has a droll sense of humor.

Altogether, I had a good time playing Crowns and Pawns. I've played plenty of worse adventure games. It's strengths are the graphics, which are very pleasing throughout, the characters, who are all either likeable or boo-hiss as appropriate and the setting, which is original.  

The mechanics are mostly very sound. Using items from inventory and combining them is intuitive and straightforward. Most things work as you'd expect. Movement is mostly walking slowly but you can double-click to move instantly from location to location including, within scenes, from door to door, which is very welcome. It's just a few of the more elaborate options that don't feel as polished as they could be. 

One innovation I can't recall seeing in a point&click game before is the option to change Milda's appearance, just as you would in an RPG. They could have made a bit more of that, I thought. If the game tells you about it, I missed it. I only discovered it by accident when I noticed Milda had left her travel bag by the sofa in Joris's flat.

I clicked on it out of curiosity and it opened a window where I was able to change her clothes, style her hair and add accessories. As far as I could tell, what she wore didn't make any difference (Except the one time she had to make herself a fake hockey fan shirt so the driver would let her on the bus.) but as you can tell from the pictures, I made good use of the option anyway.

I also notice now that two of the slots, bracelets and earrings, are empty. That suggests I must have missed something along the way. I don't think I care enough to go back and look for whatever it was I missed. 

The game has a "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam and I think that's fair. I feel mostly positive about it too. Would I recommend it, though? 

Well, for a Point&Click fan, yes I would. It does more than enough right to keep the craving at bay for a few hours. For the casual player, though, probably not. There are a lot of similar but better options out there. And quite a few of them are free. Or will be if you wait long enough.

Cheers, Then...

This is the time when everyone and their cute lil' puppy puts up 2020 review and 2021 prediction posts but I'm way too disorganized for the former and as for the latter I agree with Wilhelm: "... it isn’t like the world will change dramatically tomorrow, or the next day, or on January 20th, or whenever". Or to put it another way, the world has a nasty habit of changing dramatically at any moment, individually or collectively. It does it all the time and it can keep doing it as often as it damn well likes and there's precious little any of us can do about it, so why make a big deal when a number rolls over?

One thing I can predict with some confidence about the incoming year is that I'll have more time to post, at least over the next month or two. Also more time to play video games, listen to music, watch tv shows and movies and generally give myself things to post about. 

I was more than half expecting to be spending January at home under a national lockdown or, failing that, at least a regional one, but that didn't happen (yet). As I write, the bookstore where I work is still able to keep the doors open, although it's one of the few in the chain that is, what with most of the country closed to non-essential trading and all.

No, what did happen was that I got a phone call yesterday telling me I was going back on furlough. For anyone not up to speed the way we do things here on this increasingy isolated and plague-ridden island, "furlough" means the government subsidises your employers to the tune of up to 80% of your wages on the understanding they won't cut you loose to trouble the unemployment statistics at least for the time being. 

Who you lookin' at, four-arms? Okay, that doesn't really work...

 

For a younger person, who might reasonably calculate that the virus represents a personal risk that could be borne and for whom the monthly paycheck barely covers living expenses, this would be unwelcome news. In my position, closing in on retirement and having some moderate resources to fall back on, being told I don't have to come into the center of town three days a week to spend eight hours a day mingling with the general public during a pandemic, when my age alone already puts me squarely in the mid-range of at-risk categories is hardly something to complain about. The manager who called me thanked me for taking the news so stoically but really I should have been thanking her.

How long I'll be at home is anyone's guess. The current version of the scheme is scheduled to last through the end of April but my rustication is going to depend entirely on how much business there is and therefore how much work to be done. If promises about the vaccine roll-out are kept, things could look very different by Easter but promises are promises. We'll see. I do know I'll feel a lot happier about going back once I've had the vaccine, so here's hoping.

Prospects for the blog and for gaming look more predictable and indeed more positive. During the long lockdown last spring and my subsequent summer furlough the weather was largely warm and sunny. I spent a lot of time walking, gardening and doing up the house. Even so I managed to post close to daily for six consecutive months. This time it's freezing cold and likely to stay that way for weeks so you'd think I'd be able to do even better. 

2020 saw the highest number of posts here since the blog began. I was kind of hoping to crack three hundred but in the end I capped out at two-hundred and ninety-three, beating the existing record by forty-three posts. Since that record was set the previous year, when I racked up a nice, round two-fifty as I spent most of my time at home either recovering from being in hospital or on chemo, I think it's safe to say this blog prospers from either myself or the world spending time in what Marwood calls the arena of the unwell. On balance I'd vote for fewer posts if that's what it takes to pad the count but you make your lemonade with the fruit they throw at you, I guess.

Looking forward to what games I might be playing or writing about I imagine things will drift along on the same broad currents. There should be weeks left yet in the EverQuest II expansion Reign of Shadows. I've finished both the adventure and tradeskill signature lines on my berserker/weaponsmith but I'll almost certainly take the necromancer through the adventure line and the sage, alchemist and probably the carpenter through the tradeskill, which is relatively short and easy to repeat. 

After that there are four more adventure classes I could do but more likely I'll make up my mind on what I want my Vah Shir to be and concentrate on that. I'm sitting on several boosts to 100 and 110 so I'll almost certainly skip the first century of levels. I did those fairly recently on my fury and I also have my dirge over on Kaladim should I feel like re-re-re-exploring some older zones.

Seriously, dude? Has no-one ever heard of a trigger warning?

 

I'll keep logging in to EverQuest to set my Overseer quests and collect the rewards before transferring them onto my other account to sell offline in the Bazaar. I'm making a lot of money for that ten minute daily commitment. Now I'm furloughed I might even find the time to browse the Bazaar and see what I can spend it on.

In Guild Wars 2 I'll undoubtedly continue doing dailies on two accounts every day. That's why they call them dailies. I'll check out the Living Story updates as they appear but other than the two or three hours it takes to run through the storyline each time I probably won't stick around. 

World vs World, on the other hand, remains a drop-in option I pick up at least once or twice a week. In a weird way the game mode seems to have reached some kind of stable plateau. It's a long way below the heights of popularity it once enjoyed but far above the bottomless abyss it looked set to fall into just a year or two back. Plenty of big fights and a surprisng number of people still taking the scoring system sufficiently seriously for things not to seem parodically pointless as was the case not so long ago.

I haven't unsubscribed from World of Warcraft yet. I keep thinking I ought to because literally all I do is log in my dwarf hunter to do garrison stuff. If he amasses enough hexweave cloth to make a bag he makes a bag. If he's run out of sumptuous fur he goes out and slaughters mobs until he has a hundred or so. Other than that I don't do anything. It hardly seems worth paying ten pounds a month for.

Who I'm making the bags for is also a question I ask myself frequently, along with why I'm bothering. I could clearly make the gold to buy the same bags at the auction house a great deal faster than I can get the resources to craft them but you end up doing these things in the name of "playing" the game, somehow.

Yeah, I really don't recall inviting you guys over...

 

With the extra furlough time, though, I'm thinking I might actually get back to levelling my vulpera hunter and generally exploring and adventuring again. That would certainly make keeping the subscription worthwhile so immediate cancellation is looking less likely than it was. If this goes on I might even buy Shadowlands. I like a lot of what I've been reading about how it plays.

I'm keeping an eye on FHX, the Ferentus revival. I really enjoyed the short time I spent there and I'd relish another short beta run. I have several other ongoing development projects in my sights, any of which might make itself available at some point, in which case you'll read about it here. And there are always the dozens of older mmorpgs I've played and will most likely play again, albeit never for long. Might write about those if I play them or I might not.

As far as major prospects for long-term future mmorpg involvement go I can think of four or five but the only ones I would expect to see open their doors to the general public in 2021 are New World, which I have on pre-order, and Crowfall, which I don't currently plan to buy, although if there's a free option, as they originally suggested there would be, I'd be bound to take a look. I don't see either Ashes of Creation or Pantheon, the two I'm really interested in, coming to anything substantial this year. I'd love to be proved wrong.

Outside the mmo genre I'm steadily working my way through the Blackwell Chronicles. I've finished Legacy, Unbound and Conversion and I've just started Deception. After that there's only Epiphany to go. I'm going to save my powder until I get to the very end because there's an intriguing meta-plot developing and I suspect any conclusions I draw before I get to the end of the whole sequence could prove to be unreliable. 

Read the body language, guys.

 

No doubt there will be a few free games from Amazon Prime to talk about and I'm minded to buy a title or two on Steam. I vacillated for a while over Disco Elysium when it was on sale but I wasn't convinced I had the time for it. Now I might. It's 40% off for another four days. I'm still thinking.

The music posts will keep coming. Sorry about that . (Sorry not sorry). I haven't done any themed ones for quite a while. I fancy getting back to those. Must be some more animals I can pit against each other in a musical cage fight. I keep getting ideas for themes but then I forget them just as fast. I might have to start writing them down.

I'd also like to sprinkle in some media posts, by which I mostly mean tv shows, although some book reviews could be a welcome addition to the repertoire here. I've seen a couple of shows I haven't noticed anyone mention so I might share something on those. I've really benefitted from tv-watching recommendations (and warnings) on blogs I read so I think even the odd throwaway comment can have value.

As must be painfully obvious though, I don't really do much in the way of planning. I tend to open up the blog and start typing and whatever comes, comes. I imagine that will be the main theme of 2021 here - me waffling about my latest obsession or fancy, usually at inordinate length.

In the end what I'd really like from 2021 is the opportunity to keep on doing what I've been doing so far. There have been times when that seemed like a stretch and looked at a certain way it still does. Here's wishing us all a year ahead we'll find we can enjoy, somehow, and if we can't manage to enjoy it then at least let's all get through it together so we can try again in twelve months time.

These days even that seems like a lot to ask but if you don't ask...

Ready For Combat: New World

Earlier this week Syp used MassivelyOP's "Daily Grind" column to start a discussion about the future of tab targeting and whether it even has one. He was bouncing off an earlier column by Tyler F.M. Edwards, in which Tyler sang the praises of New World's action combat system, a subject about which Seanas, writing in a comment on one of my own recent posts on Amazon's game, expressed a very different opinion.

Here's Seanas on combat in New World:

"*poor* ...  everything bad about ESO (slow, unresponsive, easily cheeseable) taken to the extreme".

And here's Tyler:

"easy to learn, but hard to master; challenging, but not frustrating; engaging, but not exhausting... could well become the new gold standard for MMO combat".

That's quite a divergence. I can't say I'd really thought about it all that much but I guess if I'd been asked I'd have come down somewhere in the middle. Like Syp, I am not a big fan of action combat in MMORPGs but by now I've done a huge amount of it. I have a pretty wide range of examples with which to compare New World's style. If pushed, I'd probably have said it felt something like a cross between Black Desert Online's wild flailing and the rubbery, haptic bounce of the original Dragon Nest.

I suppose I ought to have had a more coherent opinion by now. I've done my share of fighting in New World, after all, even if most of it was back in the beforetimes, about which we may not speak.

If combat had changed since then I wouldn't be allowed to mention it but during my six hours in the Preview so far I can't say I'd noticed anything very different about it.  Then again, I'd only really fought the minimum required number of mobs for the quests I took, which wasn't all that many. And it was so ridiculously busy for most of the time I was there it was all I could do find anything to kill at all. I certainly wasn't thinking about the aesthetics.

It ocurred to me that, with the Preview coming to an end in a couple of days, it might be an idea to go test the combat for myself. I wanted to spend some more time in New World anyway but I didn't want to get caught up in progression. I'll be doing that for real when the game launches next year and I'd prefer to keep my powder dry until then.

I also wanted to see some diferent parts of the map. With all that in mind, it seemed like a plan to make a new character, pick a different starting area and go kill stuff for an hour or so. By now the lower levels should have emptied out a bit with most people either having moved on or dropped out.

So that's what I did. And my experience was quite different, this time around.

For one thing, I was quite right about the population having moved on. Instead of barely being able to see the first quest-giver through the jostling crowd, I was the only one there. I did the first seven levels without seeing anyone else at all.

There were plenty of people in the town when I got that far. They were crafting, working on quests, using the storage shacks and generally making the place feel lived-in. Out in the corrupted countryside there was the same purposeful activity with people working on whatever quests or projects they had going. 

I picked up a series of quests that sent me out to kill various nasties, some of them twenty at a time. It gave me ample opportunity to take a good, long look at the combat system. Whether or not I can say anything very insightful about what I saw is another matter. I'm no expert on combat mechanics in video games. I don't have the vocabulary to discuss the fine details and the nuances.

What I can do is talk about how the combat feels. And it feels pretty good.

It is chaotic, or it seems so at first. There's an awful lot of jumping and lunging. I found myself facing the wrong direction pretty often. It wasn't so much that I was throwing myself about all over the place intentionally. I was just trying to keep up with the mobs.

It seems as though every mob type behaves differently or near as dammit The AI feels quite complex for an MMORPG. In a farm or a cave that's been overrun by undead there might be three or four different kinds, all of them with their own way of fighting. Sometimes it depends what weapon they're using, sometimes it's more about how many limbs they have left.

A lot seems obvious. If a mob has a shield, it blocks just like a player would. If it has grenades, it hangs back and throws them. Nothing very unusual about that. Rank seems to enter into things as well, with quartermasters or cooks or second mates displaying more cunning or vigor in their atacks than generic sailors can manage.

There's a very kinetic feel to combat in New World. Mobs circle and dart, striking then pulling back out of reach. Comparatively intelligent undead, the intact, better-dressed corrupted or the glowing skeletons, seem to recall more from when they were alive. They feint and defend, making fighting them feel like a duel or a dance. By contrast, the far-gone shamblers, ragged, limbs missing, the farm workers, clutching pitchforks as they go through the empty movements of their meaningless parody of labor,  just charge in to attack without benefit of strategy or tactics.

Animals behave approximately as you might expect. Prey species like rabbits and turkeys don't fight back at all. They run away, making it as hard as possible to catch them. Then they die in a single hit.

Still, it doesn't do to turn your back on even the most innocuous animal. One time, a sheep ran up behind me on the road, butted me in the backside, then ran away. It wasn't even a ram, either. I have yet to be savaged by a bunny but it could happen.

Wolves, though... wolves are smart. Up to level 12, which is as far as I've gotten so far, I found wolves to be the hardest of all mobs to kill. A wolf three levels lower than me was a tougher fight than almost any undead as much as two levels above.

Wolves never stay still. They put their heads down and come at you fast, then suddenly spin and turn in the air so they're to one side of you or even behind. Then when you turn and try to strike they leap back out of reach.

When fighting wolves I frequently found myself disoriented and dizzy. They always managed to wear me down if I got into a to-and-fro with them. So I tried not to do that. Instead I always tried to rush them from behind, stun them and then pound on them as fast and hard as I could. And even then it was touch and go, sometimes.

I'm certain none of this is remotely new or original for video game combat but it does seem unusual for an MMORPG. As Tyler mentions in his article, this is perhaps why there are so few buttons to press. With so much movement and so much to watch you really don't have time to be building chains and searching for function keys.

Here's a useful data point. It's a sample of one - me - and therefore about as anecdotal as you can get but I think it's telling. I used my shield to block on multiple occasions. I've played plenty of MMORPGs that give you an active block skill but I very rarely use it. Pretty much only on bosses where it's virtually scripted that you have to.

Just as Guild Wars 2 converted me to the active pleasures of dodge-rolling eight years ago, I get the feeling New World could teach me to love blocking. For possibly the first time it feels intuitive not artificial. That says something, although possibly only about me.

Weapon skill progresses nicely. Everything I say here is based on my experience with just one weapon, the long sword. I had most of the others  - hatchet, big hammer, magic staff, bow (and that seems to be about the lot) but it seemed prudent to stick to one in the short time available.

By level twelve I had a nice spinning AE and an extremely satisfying and effective leap. And I was using them, too. As I earned points I spent them on new fighting skills, which gave me a grand total of four buttons to press - LMB, RMB, Q and R. There's one more to open, E by default. Even I can manage a mouse and three buttons. Probably.

One acid test for action combat I sometimes use is whether or not I can win a fight with the UI switched off. It's very useful to me to be able to go a whole fight without the UI and not die because that lets me take combat screenshots for the blog.

By the time I got to the scary ruined tower in the lake, surrounded by and filled with glowing skeletal guardians I felt confident enough to give it a try. I fought and beat two skels in a row without benefit of onscreen information. All I had to do was watch their moves and counter them with the four buttons. Really just with the mouse, most of the time.

Of course, the big problem in playing with the UI off in any game is knowing how much damage you've taken. Or the mob, for that matter. in this case it was a nice surprise to turn the details back on and find I'd actually lost less health than I was used to losing when I could see what I was doing!

I'm aware lots of people already play this way - not necessarily with the UI switched off but by looking mostly at the mobs and their movements. I don't, though. I've tried it and I don't like it. Only, playing  New World, yesterday, I found I did quite like it, after all. That does suggest to me that Tyler's take on how good the combat is comes closer to my own experience than Seanas's.

That said, I do still agree with Syp. No matter how good the action combat is, it does get exhausting. Tab targeting is undoubtedly less tiring, both on the mind and the body.

If I had the choice, I'd still prefer New World used tab targeting and hot keys. But no-one's giving me that choice. If it's going to be action combat then I'd sooner have this version than most I've tried.

You'll Love The New World

Yesterday Amazon threw open the gates for the preview of their much altered and re-scheduled MMORPG, New World. Providing you qualified for the first wave, that is. Judging by the hordes of Robinson Crusoe lookalikes I had to shoulder past to get to the first quest-giver, it looks like qualification wasn't all that hard.

Logging in almost as soon as the game became playable on Steam, I set myself the goal of getting to Level 10 and I'd have made it, too, if it hadn't been for those pesky other players. It may not be a free-for-all PvP game any more but I'd rather fight players than lag any day.

It was fine when I started. A bit choppy in the really busy spots but generally very playable. By the time I was closing in on Level 10 about three hours later, though, my screen was a slideshow and the  game was unplayable.

When I say "lag" I am, of course, using the lazy gamerspeak meaning of "poor frame-rate". My latency was fine. I'd picked a server in the U.S. East Coast cluster, as I said I would, and it had the second-best ping of all of them. The EU server had the lowest, scotching my translatlantic cable theory, but ping isn't everything.

As well as the real world location of your server, you also have to pick an in-game starting location. I wasn't expecting that. There are three choices: Cruel Vista, Deadman's Anchor and Cascade Harbor but nothing to tell you the difference between them.

It's an important decision because you can only make characters on one server in each location. There's a warning about it in case you planned to play with friends. I imagine the choice sets PvP factions in the way you had to choose between Albion, Hibernia and Midgard in Dark Age of Camelot. I always liked that set-up.

Since I didn't know anything about any of them and since I'll only be here for a week, I just went with the server at the top of the list, Leyroot (Cruel Vista). Once that decision was made, up came a cinematic with a rather good opening, the camera swooping down to street level from the rooftops to reveal an intimidating figure in ornate plate armor. Then the action moves to a sailing ship at sea and... cut!

My turn again. On to character creation

Options there are good, if limited. Two genders, plenty of hairstyles and skin tones, several faces, all the basics. None of the extreme body modding you get in imported MMOs, which suits me. I like playing around with sliders but I like not being tempted to even more. I wouldn't mind being able to change the color of my eyes, though.

Character duly created, it was back to the cinematic, which, it turns out, had merely paused, not ended. The mini-movie continued, now with my character in the central role. A nice touch. She waited on deck, attentive, while someone explained the plot. Then a monster appeared and the screen went black.

Haven't I been here before? Don't call the lawyers! I don't mean in the previous under-NDA tests. I mean in every MMO since the dawn of time. How many of them begion with your character travelling somewhere then being attacked and waking up alone and in rags on a beach? Is it all of them?

At least it's traditional. And New World is turning out to be a lot more of a traditional MMORPG than many people seemed to think it was going to be. Or wanted it to. Not me, of course. The more old-school it cleaves, the better I like it.

The first few minutes couldn't be more familiar. As you struggle through the waves to shore the game tells you all the basics, like what keys to press to move (WASD - did you guess?) and hit things (Left Mouse Button. Yes, it's one of those).

There isn't a lot to learn but I still didn't like some of the choices I was given. Who uses "E" for Interact, ffs?  So I changed the ones I didn't like, which you're free to do. Problem solved. Oh, except for "Hide UI", which for some inexplicable reason is hard-locked to Alt-H. I hate multiple key combos. Ah, well. Blogger problems. No-one cares about those.

Speaking of blogger problems, we're not allowed to say anything about previous alphas or betas or whatever they were, which, while not being anywhere near as frustrating as not being able  to say anything about the game at all, is still annoying. All I'll say in conclusion about the opening few minutes of the game is hmm.... déjà vu. And bear in mind I wasn't even invited to the more recent test.

The introduction concludes with a "boss" fight, all very flashy and spectacular, with a scripted ending and then you're into the game proper. Once again, all very familiar.

From then on, for as far as I got in my first session, the flow felt linear and quest-driven. Hardly surprising or unreasonable since at this stage it is mostly an extended tutorial. It definitely feels more like a traditional quest-driven MMORPG than an open-world survival game, even if much of what the quests are teaching you could be regarded as surivival mechanics.

One thing that occurred to me quite quickly was that the environment wasn't as luminously beautiful as I'd been expecting. Partly that was because Cruel Vista turned out to be oddly tropical, rather than the deciduous forest-and-plain I was expecting. I think it must be in the Florida-equivalent part of the New  World.

I checked my settings anyway and found they were all defaulted to "High"  except for the overall graphical quality, which for some reason was set to "Low". I know I have an ageing PC that barely qualified as mid-range when I bought it more than five years ago but still. Surely I can do better than that.

I flipped the rogue setting to match the others. Things looked a lot better after that and I didn't notice any deterioration in performance. That didn't come until later. There are two more quality levels above that so I imagine most people are seeing something even more spectacular than I am. I might experiment further, although everything looks pretty enough to be going on with on "High".

If the countryside looked good, the town, when I got there, looked fantastic. I was more surprised to find there was a town than how good it looked. I know we aren't supposed to talk about the before-times but, well, this was the first "town" I ever saw in the game. It seems this version of New World takes place in a slightly different time-frame, when there's still something approaching a functional society with a working infrastructure rather than just a few beleagured wooden forts and a whole load of ruins.

Town was bustling. It was here that I began to run into technical problems. I'd had to take an  unexpected break for an hour to go cut up a large chunk of one of our trees that the gales had just   brought down in my neighbor's garden. By the time I got back it was late-afternoon on the East Coast and the crowds were thick on the streets.

I went from NPC to NPC, learning how to use the bank and the crafting stations and generally being groomed to become a useful member of society. Talking to NPCs felt strange. None of them spoke out loud, which did seem odd in a game this slick and polished. Maybe that's why they need another year, to record all the voiceovers.

I'm so used to voice acting in MMORPGs now it's jarring to find it isn't there. It wouldn't matter so much if the text was worth reading, I guess. Don't I always say I can do the voices better in my head?  It's not as though the quest dialog is bad, not by any means, It's competently written, grammatically correct and the NPCs are keen to talk about matters that feel like they ought be intriguing and mysterious. It just feels a little flat and unconvincing. Decent voice-acting would probably cover that.

But  then, I 've said the very same about the quest writing in Elder Scrolls Online, which many people think is some of the best in the genre, so what do I know? And quest text is one of my little things. I'm not sure most people would either notice or care. How many players even read the quest text to begin with?

For those who do, and who feel strongly about it, there's a feedback survey you can opt to take. It pops up after you close the game. Most of it is rankings. I gave nearly everything 80%or better because I really like the game.

They also ask for suggestions to make the game better and I said I thought the NPCs needed more flavor. My only other observation was that the survey asked too many questions that couldn't reasonably be answered after one session. If that's the worst I can come up with the game must be doing pretty much everything right.

Well, for the first ten levels, at least. Can't speak for what happens after that. maybe next time. Or maybe not. I have about a week to play and athough I can absolutely guarantee that, were this the first week of New World's live launch, I'd be giving it several hours of my time every day, I'm not so sure I'm going to push that hard just for a Preview character that will be wiped in a week.

This is a first impressions piece, though, and you don't have to get all that far or play for very long to have some of those. Mine are extremely positive. 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?

I'm very curious to see what else Amazon thinks needs to be added before launch that's going to take them a whole year. I'm pretty sure plenty of supposedly AAA MMORPGs have gone to market in a less finished state than this. I wonder if it's perfectionism or professionalism that lies behind the delay.

I guess we'll find out a year from now. I don't think they'll miss another launch date.

I sure hope not. I want to play.

Just A Preview: New World

The access code and instructions for Amazon's upcoming New World preview popped up in my inbox this afternoon. In keeping with all the previous tests it looks to be a highly organized and efficient affair, if somewhat over-complicated.

I never did get around to using my code for the recent stress test, or "Density Test" as Amazon like to call it. The times were very inconvenient for me. I don't think any of them co-incided with a period when I would normally be at the keyboard. I knew that when I decided to download the game, although I did think I might make the effort and stay up a little later than usual just to see what was what. In the end that never happened. I like my sleep too much.

Even so, I thought it would be worth the trouble of installing the game since I was going to have to do it for the Preview anyway. And then Amazon announced the Preview would be using a different client so we could go ahead and delete the one we'd just installed. It seemed a bit odd in as much as you'd think the information gained during the Density test  would relate to the iteration of the client used in the Density test but I'm sure they know their business.

There's what seems to be an unecessarily complicated matrix explaining who gets to play when:

 Looking at that, couldn't it be condensed into two lines? 

• All Pre-order Customers- August 25.
• Everyone else - August 25-29.

I guess it's friendly of them to over-explain. Better than the other way around, at least.

Also, 2016? Were they really taking pre-orders in 2016? If you'd asked me, I'd have said it was no more than a couple of years ago that I first heard of New World, but that just shows either how time flies or how poor my memory is. Both, probably.

A quick check shows I was writing about the announcement almost four years ago. Not to honk my own horn but I called it from the start : "It does seem unlikely that Jeff Bezos will want to restrict the potential to the relatively small FFA PvP market when there's a much greater restricted PvP and pure PvE audience to tap." Yeah, got that right, although I don't guess Jeff Bezos intervened personally. Then again, maybe he did.

I'm very keen to get my hands on the current shop-window edition of New World, partly because I've missed playing it. I was a little miffed never to get an invite to the second alpha, not least because the trickle of information that leaked out seemed very encouraging. Mostly, though, I'm looking forward to the Preview because for the first time I'll actually be able to talk openly about what I see there.

Not being able to blog about my time in the first alpha was frustrating; not being able to post any of my gorgeous screenshots, even more so. Now, finally, I'll be able to say whatever I like and put up pictures, too.

Still can't talk about anything that happened before, which is mildly annoying because comparisons of how things have changed would obviously be meaningful and illuminating. I imagine some unavoidable subtext will leak through, even if unintentionally. Hard to preclude it completely and I'm not sure I'm going to try all  that hard.

Checking Steam, the new client seems to have updated while I was writing this post, so now all that's left to do is wait. As a pre-orderer I should be able to log into the game on Tuesday at around five in the evening, a highly convenient and sociable time.

There are five regions for the Preview:

It's a long time since I played an MMORPG that gave me a choice of East and West Coast U.S.A. For cultural reasons, I always prefer to play on American servers if given the choice but from the U.K. ping to the Eastern Seaboard can often be better than ping to Central Europe so it's a done deal.

The Preview lasts a generous ten days, which should be more than enough to give it a good shake. I'm looking forward to it.

Watch this space for further revelations. Er, better make that just revelations, I guess. Not like I ever revealed anything before. No, not at all.

Here We Go Again : Blade And Soul

Okay, I admit it. All I really wanted to do was post that screenshot. Now I suppose I'd better think of something to say about it.

I blame Kaozz. Her blog, ECTMMO, has a long history of nudging me into downloading MMOs I probably shouldn't. Perhaps I should say a Loong history. Of course, I'd heard about Blade and Soul before I read her moderately enthusiastic review earlier today but I'd never worked up much interest in it.

It looked pretty enough in pictures and those cats were...a thing...but Wuxia is not a genre that I have any history with, in or out of games and most of all it was another Action MMO. As I keep saying, I can play action MMOs if I really have to, but I prefer not. What's more, I already have a new no-cursors-allowed game on the go in Otherland.

Then Kaozz has to go and mention that if you hit shift-F2 the entire UI converts from action mode to a WoW-style hotbar clicker. Add to that the fact that, as I noticed a while ago, B&S is published by NCSoft, with whom I already have an account, so form filling would be at a minimum and my resolve, never strong at the best of times when it comes to resisting new MMOs, collapsed.

After a couple of hours play I'm scarcely in a position even to do a First Impressions piece but here are my first impressions:

• Slick, smooth, fast installation process. Really top notch. I love the way the tiny installation download simply installs the game's regular patcher from which you patch the entire game. Elegant.

• Character Creation is equally well-designed. Very easy to follow, plenty of choice, lots of presets, no sliders. Classes seem to be locked to races. Didn't notice if they're also loked to gender. I went Summoner because That Cat which means I am the cute, small race. Win!

• Atmospheric opening cut scene leads into dull tutorial leads into extremely atmospheric, extended cut scene. This in turn leads to some tonal shifts that I found problematic and these continue in the starting area. Hardly an unusual problem for either Eastern or Western MMOs, that.

•  Thought bubbles beside NPCs telling you what's going on in their mind as they talk to you is something I can't recall seeing before in an MMO. There's potential in that idea. Not sure it's going to get used for much more than comedy effect here but still...

• The UI is awkward and ugly. It's moveable but the editor is cluttered and confusing so I left it as it is, mostly. Too much text in the center of the screen, which I guess is an action MMO thing. Functionally it's fine. 

• Having to hold down shift to sprint is annoying. If there's a keybind for it I couldn't see it. I wouldn't bother sprinting at all but you need to sprint to get into the air and glide, which is fun. Also, pro tip, don't glide off the cliffs in the tutorial. I did and I couldn't get back. At least I know how to revive when I die now.

• This game has the best screenshot function I have ever seen in an MMO! They take screenshots really seriously. There are multiple formats to choose from, the game prints the file location in chat so you know where they've gone and best of all a voiceover confirms you've taken the shot. Just brilliant. 

• Visually Blade and Soul is okay. Sometimes it looks amazing, other times it looks flat and false like the set for a movie. Some things don't seem to have the weight or density or mass you'd expect. Not really seen enough to judge how much of a problem this might be. I felt the same in ArcheAge at the start but a few quest hubs the world started to look and feel much more solid. Maybe it's an acclimatization issue.

• Quest translations are, largely, in good English. I only noticed one glaring error. Voiceovers are bland but competent. I'd already started reading ahead and cutting them off before they finished speaking by the time I was halfway through the tutorial.

• The opening scenario is incredibly cliched but the writers know it is and play with it. Without spoiling much I can confirm that my character was woken up from a comatose state not once but four times with increasing ironic intent. It amused me and made me mildly optimistic for the storyline to come.

• The quests did not. Not by a very, very long chalk. I don't think there's one in the first three or four locations that I literally haven't done before almost action for action in other MMOs. Anyone with a low tolerance for potboiler filler quests is going to be tearing their hair out in ten minutes. Fortunately my tolerance for that sort of thing is sky high.

• If you think that cat looks creepy you should hear him talk. And he's the least creepy of the five you get to choose from. 

• Fighting seems easy enough but then it always is at these levels. You'd hope. I'm just pressing keys at random. I didn't bother to read any of the spell descriptions. Everything so far has died in a couple of hits. If I start to struggle, then I'll look into what does what. Anyway, the cat can do the heavy lifting.

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? It's certainly been worth the very small trouble it was to download and install. What more can you ask for free?

Pocket Review, Take Two : ArcheAge

The brief ArcheAge open beta has come and gone. I manged to fit in two short sessions, maybe four or five hours altogether. I played one character to just under level eight in an MMO where the general consensus seems to be that the real game doesn't even begin until level 30. Many say 50.

It's not much to base an opinion on but that never stopped me before. My verdict is this:

Enjoyed: Will Play Again.

Having dutifully followed the constrictive demands of the tutorial in my opening session, I chose instead, on my second outing, simply to head over the next hill and see what trouble I could get myself into. In other words I began to play normally.

ArcheAge features an extremely unattractive, alienating HUD-style "mini" map (I put mini in inverted commas because something that covers the best part of a quarter of the field of view can hardly be called small) and a lovely, faux-parchment, immersive main map. I opened the latter, oriented myself, and headed off along the road in search of adventure.

After a short stopover at a farm, where I sheared some sheep (hmm, this reminds me of Mabinogi) and killed some bees wasps (the farmer seemed confused over which they were and, hmm, this reminds me of GW2) I wandered around a stable-yard trying to work out how to get a horse. Other people had them. They kept thundering past me on the road, kicking dust in my face.

This scene looks positively Flemish.

No-one would sell, rent, or lend me any kind of mount but I did manage to vault onto the back of someone else's horse, while they were still on it, which was profoundly unexpected and not a little embarrassing. The designated rider just sat there as if uninvited horse-passengers were an everyday occurrence, which, for all I know, they may well be. Since he didn't seem inclined either to comment or to take me for a test-ride, after a minute or two I jumped down and continued my travels on foot.

By now I could see a coastal town of some size on the map so I headed there to get a look at the famous ArcheAge sea. Traveling along the road seemed entirely safe. Even the harpies flapping in the nearby fields declined to pay me any mind. Although horses cantered past me as I jogged along the miles passed quickly enough and the gates of the city soon came into view.

You shall be Lord Mayor, Dick Whittington!

The city, whose name I didn't note, was built on the scale of most fantasy MMO towns, with ceilings way too high and doors way too large to feel natural or comfortable for anyone shorter than a half-giant. There seemed to be a band playing in front of the fountain in the main square. Unfortunately whatever music they might have been making was drowned out by the ArcheAge soundtrack, which is among the worst I have heard in an MMO. If I play regularly it may be the first where I have to turn the music off altogether.

Excuse me, can you tell me the way to The Prancing Pony?

The architecture is no great shakes compared to other worlds I've visited either. That fountain's no LA lion, that's for sure. Gawping around town like a sightseer I found what might pass for an art gallery, although it might have been a palace. Even the guards were editorializing about their own lax security so it's hard to be sure. I have an odd feeling I might have seen some of those paintings before...

Who hung those? The janitor?

Opening the map again showed a detailed view of the city with the docks clearly marked. I headed that way but, on a whim, I spoke to a man in dress-armor reviewing some troops in the atrium on the way out. By a stroke of synchronicity he suggested I speak to someone at dockside about getting a rowing boat.

A boat! That's so much better than a horse! Don't have to ask me twice.

No, I do not want to go on a cruise around the bay with "a real pirate", thank you, fishface.

At the docks there were more of the strange air-breathing fishmen, their scales and piratical stylings looking marginally more in keeping at waterside than in the farmland where I'd encountered them earlier. Marginally. A six-foot tall walking fish in a frock-coat, monocle and tri-corn hat isn't really going to look "in keeping" anywhere outside of a museum of surrealism or a 1950s Disney animated classic.

Are you sure that's the right translation?

They weren't much help but a regular human standing not far off pointed me to a rack of rowboats and invited me to help myself. Which I did. With alacrity. The mechanics of launching a boat seemed familiar. Stand near water, open inventory, click on icon. (Hmm..Vanguard). Boarding and rowing were equally intuitive (if in doubt Press "F").


The boat was a joy to control. It moved responsively and smoothly but with enough heft and resistance to feel convincing. The animations were excellent. I rowed around for a while just for the fun of watching myself row.

Heave-ho!

Eventually I decided it was time to row somewhere specific. Since I hadn't paid the least attention to what either the rowboat man or the man in armor who sent me to him had said I just looked for a landmark and rowed towards it. The landmark I chose was a pair of large, moored vessels along the coast and by sheer chance (or possibly unconscious memory) that turned out to be the very beach where the pirates I was meant to be dealing with were based.

Once I worked out how to park the boat and disembark fighting ensued. The very first pirate I saw was a Captain. He had one star in a list of maybe five possible stars under his name, the first such denomination I'd noticed. I twigged immediately that he was a stronger opponent than the average pirate, although if I hadn't worked it out for myself the helpful tutorial hint that popped up advising me of the benefits of grouping with other players for more difficult fights might have given the game away.

Now that's a good idea!

I pulled him anyway and, solo in my starting gear and early quest rewards, he was a fair contest. I was always going to win. Indeed, in the entire time I played I never once died to a mob. Players...we're getting to that.

On the pirate beach I picked up a couple more quests and a daily from a signpost. I was merrily slaughtering my way across the sand, facing up to a particularly aggressive crayfish, when a player emerged from the surf beside me. I noticed immediately that her name and guild were all in red.

Red is for danger so I was alert for trouble. Still, so far as I knew, I was still in a safe area. No danger of PvP for me unless I'm the one to start it. Then she stood directly between me and the crayfish and I divined her intention. I sidestepped neatly to the right and sent my arrow past her self-sacrificing shoulder into the crustacean behind her. Passively acknowledging the failure of her crude piratical ruse, she ran off into the scrub beyond the beach, never to to be seen again.


Would that I had been so cautious and prepared a few minutes later. It was growing late so I finished up on the beach and decided to take the rowboat for jaunt across the bay. There was no sign of my boat where I'd left it beached, which made me think of thieving pirates, but a quick check of my bags found it despawned safely inside.

On reflection, maybe he thought I was planning on ramming him.

Back on the water I set out, rowing heartily, towards the far shore. Before very long I spotted a smart yacht cutting through the waves. "Photo opportunity" was my immediate thought and I turned straight for it, meaning to pull alongside. Fortunately I took a snapshot as I approached because the instant the skipper spotted me he hauled on the sail, turned on his own length and BANG!

Whatever he'd done, it one-shotted me. I lay dead in the gunnels, laughing. Well, I was about to stop anyway. At least it gave me the opportunity to try out the Revive option before beta ended.

My money's on the bear.

I respawned back on dry land at a shrine I couldn't remember visiting so presumably thre post-death mechanic puts you at the nearest one available. I wandered around for a little while, stopped for a minute to stare at a curious menagerie outside someone's house, then finally decided to call it a night.

All in all a jolly entertaining romp. Obviously I have barely even scratched the varnish on the surface of the deep layers of player-driven content available. I reserve judgment on that for much later. For now, though, I can say that the exploration is inviting, the questing is no worse than many other MMOs (I found it more interesting than most bloggers and commenters seem to have done, but then I probably enjoy questing more than the average MMO player these days), the combat is satisfyingly mid-school (more WoW than EQ but still very familiar) and the sailing is top-notch. Okay, the rowing.

Excuse me Miss, have you wandered in from another game?

ArcheAge reminds me very heavily of a number of MMOs I've played. Other than the focus on a player-driven economy (which is, of course, the staple of another long-established MMO, EVE) I'd struggle to think of anything in AA that I haven't already experienced somewhere else.

If I had to pick one MMO that AA most resembles it would definitely be Mabinogi.  I always wanted to play Mabinogi a lot more than I did but I struggled with the very odd perspective there and anyway, a long time back, they changed something and the game simply wouldn't run on my machine any more. I think ArcheAge should make a very good Mabinogi-substitute.

I look forward to launch with some enthusiasm. I just hope Trion have re-recorded the voice acting by then. Hearing NPCs speaking Korean doesn't really cut it, immersion-wise.