Legends of Aria : Brief Impressions

When I logged out last night, I was in two minds whether to post about Legends of Aria. After all, I hadn't even been planning on playing it. In fact, I'd forgotten it existed until I happened to tab across to Massively:OP and land on a key giveaway. Never turn down a free beta key, even if it's only good for seven days. Every MMO is worth at least a look.

The registration and installation process was very easy and Character creation is basic so that didn't take long. I went with a female warrior with red hair in a bob, wearing a crafting vest and a maxi-skirt straight out of 1972. No pictures, sadly. I hadn't loaded FRAPS and I failed to find any screenshot function.

There were skills to choose and points to spend. I didn't realize that taking them overwrote the default skills you start with so I ended up with a Warrior who could tame animals but couldn't use a sword... or something. Honestly, I wasn't paying that much attention.

And that's all you're getting!

There was a choice of four starting areas. I picked the worst one. Actually, I can't say for absolute certain it's the worst. I've only seen one of the others. I just can't imagine there's anywhere less appealing than where I ended up that first time.

The town I picked was a port on the edge of a desert. When I arrived the game gave me a perfunctory introduction to the UI and told me how to fight (hit Space, target your enemy and run at it - subtle!). After that I was on my own.

The controls were abominable. WASD kind of worked. Perspective was a strangled three-quarter view. The screen wouldn't turn or rotate. The camera was fixed other than a limited dolly in and out.

I struggled with that for a few minutes until I was on the verge of quitting and uninstalling. It was when I was googling to see if there was a screenshot key (nope) that I found out about the almost invisible cog on the mini-map that opens the Options screen.

Me and my Big Book of Spells.

The limited choices there at least allowed me to enable full WASD and also click-to-move as well as to roatate the screen via the right mouse button. A combination of all those made the game just about playable so I carried on.

There were NPCs but none of them seemed to do much. You could speak to them and they had a line or two of flavor dialog but nothing more. I had at least picked up that Legends of Aria is a full-fat sandbox so I took it that I was supposed to make my own entertainment. I jogged out of town looking for something to kill or gather, that being about the be-all and end-all of entetainment in most sandboxes at the start (apart, obviously, from being ganked by anyone a few sessions ahead of you).

No-one did, in fact, gank me, although there were times when I would have willingly run onto a sword just to have something happen. In the event, once I was a few hundred yards from the gates I never saw another player, presumably because everyone had more sense than to run out of a perfectly good town into a desert filled with snakes.

I spent the next hour or so jogging across one of the most featureless, boring maps I have ever seen in an MMORPG. Sand, sand, sand, sand, snake, snake, snake, snake, turtle, turtle, turtle, turtle, sand, sand, sand, sand.

One of the very rare occasions when my spell didn't fizzle and also hit something I was aiming at.

I killed some turtles. They were easy. I killed some snakes. So were they. Various skills incremented by 0.2. Nothing had any loot but you could get meat from the snakes so I did. There was nothing else to do.

I saw a wolf. I killed that. It was easy. I was beginning to think Warrior might be OP. I saw some camps full of humanoids. A lot of them. I edged close and they turned to look at me. Maybe not that OP. I thought better of it and carried on. After a while I was completely lost.

There was no map. Just a mini-map that told me nothing I couldn't see for myself. I was fed up of running and killing snakes so I thought I'd see what was in my bag. A rolled-up map, that's what. I clicked on it and it opened a big map like you would expect to get in most MMOs if you hit "M".

Old school. I quite liked that. I was less impressed by how much use it was. Not much. I spent a while trying to use the map to get back to where I started but I ended up going in circles. It was all getting too tedious. I logged out and went to bed.

This evening when I came home from work I read Scopique's first impressions post. That did explain things a little. I'd forgotten Legends of Aria was The Game Formerly Known As Shards, which I have a vague memory of trying in some beta or other and disliking. I'd also forgotten it was supposed to be the spiritual successor of Ultima Online, an MMO I played for two weeks in the year 2000 and didn't really like all that much either.

Me recovering some mana. Only took me about ten attempts.

Still, I have the thing for a week. Might as well have another look. So this evening I made a new character, a Mage this time, and started in one of the other towns. That part of the world was a lot less unpleasant to look at , being green and leafy rather than tan and arid. There were also a lot more people around (none of whom ganked me, again).

Other than that it was much the same only a lot harder. As in I died a lot and didn't kill much. Typical old school Mage/Warrior split. Warrior OP at start, Mage pathetic. My spells fizzled a lot and when they didn't the UI was so clunky I couldn't work out how to target and fire them before half my leg was eaten by a wolf. The heal spell made a nice healing sound and a glow but my health didn't seem to improve.

When I died the first time it took me a while to work out how to revive. I found a stone eventually but it seemed like a bit of a faff. I was losing interest and when I got killed, twice, by ramapaging skeletons (first time I pulled one to see how tough it was, second time I think I was trained) I decided life (real life, that is) was too short.

Resurrecting a stone is for losers. Tool tip tells you that. In so many words.

The reason I was in two minds about posting at all is that a) this is a proper beta and b) it takes a lot longer than a couple of hours to give even a fair "first impression" of an MMO. Anything I say would come over as unduly harsh.

On the other hand, there is the argument that as a business, once you start taking money you're fair game for any criticism your customers want to throw at you. I didn't pay but someone did. The cheapest of the beta buy-ins starts at $29.99. It would also be difficult for me to invest the hours necessary to give the thing a fair shake because I cannot cope with the camera angles and perspective - they make me feel trapped and fractious, which is not exactly the leisure experience I'm looking for right now - or ever.

That said, as Scopique points out, the finished version is supposed to allow players to create and host their own rule sets. Someone might make something more to my taste using the tools, I guess. I somehow doubt it but it's not impossible.

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.

There And Back Again

Yesterday, when I was making some largely incoherent observations on leveling speed in GW2, Tobold was examining the topic rather more clinically in the context of the upcoming release of WildStar. The gist of his argument is one with which I sympathize, namely that if  company wants me to play their MMORPG for a period measured in years rather than months they might want to consider the pacing.

Unfortunately for Tobold, and me, and anyone else who hankers after the slower pace of our MMO salad days, the likelihood of any major game developer deciding to release a triple-A MMORPG in which the majority of the appeal relies on a two thousand hour journey from creation to cap appears remote. The developer meta for these things tends to thrash around in attempt to hit all the targets but for some while now the prevailing wind has blown towards accessibility. It's all about facilitating social play rather than giving players a giant mountain to climb and letting them get on with it.

The current orthodoxy holds that commercial success in the field rests firmly on supporting (or exploiting) the bonds players form between themselves. With that comes an overriding desire to ensure that players who come to a new MMO must at all costs be able to find, meet and play with their friends. There's also an assumption, which goes virtually unquestioned, that all players whether or not they come pre-equipped with a set of gaming buddies will, as a first priority, require a Guild or a Clan.

When new cultural forms arise incrementally and haphazardly, as appears to have been the case with online roleplaying games, sifting cause from effect can be tricky. I do wonder whether the pre-eminence of Guilds as the social structure for MMORPGs might not have more to do with the very difficulty and inaccessibility of the content in those early games than with any innate desire among the players for meaningful social contact. The difficulty of soloing in Everquest has often, in my opinion, been exaggerated, but it's beyond question that those who wanted to progress faster, more efficiently or further certainly benefited enormously from having a network of like-minded players for mutual support.

I do sometimes wonder what the hobby would be like now had it come into existence back at the stub end of the 20th century with the concepts and attitudes that underpin Guild Wars 2 in place rather than those that derived from MUDs. How would things have played out if back then gameplay in the very first MMOs had been designed scrupulously to avoid almost every aspect of competition? If every resource, from crafting nodes to experience and loot gained from killing mobs or completing quests, was not just shared around but handed out equally to anyone participating, regardless of the extent of their contribution?

What if, in addition to these communitarian principles, completing the actual content itself had been as simple and manageable as it is today? If a new player coming to a new MMO could expect to progress pleasantly, productively, efficiently alone, all the way to the level cap? Had things been that way from the beginning, had the infrastructure of the games themselves automatically provided everything a player needed to succeed, would players still have chosen to form numerous, discrete, collective organizations just to have an identity larger than the individual?

Perhaps ironically, the all-pervasive online social networks that have changed the culture far more broadly and profoundly than anything within gaming could ever have done scarcely existed when the early MMOs had their brief ascendancy. Even WoW's breakout success pre-dates the adoption of Facebook and Twitter as mainstream global communication media. The extent to which awareness of that always-on connectedness now informs the design decisions underlying all forms of entertainment would be hard to overstate. Had we not, in those more benign and kindly worlds that might have been, needed to create Guilds so we could huddle together for mutual protection, perhaps in the end we'd simply have imported our Facebook groups and Twitter followers instead, with much the same effect.

Somehow I doubt it. Gamers, especially those coming from the RPG end of the spectrum, seem surprisingly resistant to drinking the social networking Kool-Aid. I have my suspicions that in an alternative history of MMORPGs that began with the emphasis on inclusion rather than competition we'd now be looking at something very much like the culture of playing alone together we've been moving towards this last half-decade but without even the nominal nod to socialization that Guilds provide.

All of which brings me to Shards, the as-yet barely-existent glimpse of what might one day become a new twist on the MMORPG rope. It's brought to you by Citadel Studios (aka The Company Formerly Known As Mythic). The "teaser video" is largely useless but this Massively piece is more informative.

The idea of what we might call Minimally Multiple Online Roleplaying Games is an intriguing one. These player-run servers, catering for dozens rather than thousands of players, might be a route back to the good old golden age days of 2000 hour leveling paths and reputation that counts for something for the few hundred people who still miss all that. It would also, neatly for my thesis, preclude the necessity for Guilds, given that the population cap for the entire server would scarcely meet the requirements of a modern-day "small family guild".

John Smedley recently raised a similar possibility for H1Z1, SOE's soon-come entry into the ever more crowded zombie survival market and while no-one knows what Landmark will grow up to be, one theory is that it could become a "make your own MMO" machine. It's all just one more step along the path to niche, a path we now seem to be traveling down at such speed that last year's Big New Idea, crowd-funded MMOs aimed at special interest groups numbering in the tens of thousands, is already beginning to look old-fashioned and unwieldy.

I have to wonder, if we keep on heading in this direction, will we eventually find we've re-invented the single-player RPG? And if the StoryBricks AI is as good as they say it is, would we even notice? Then again, perhaps that's all some of us ever wanted anyway...