Silence And Shrinkage: A Tale Of Two Titles

A couple of apparently unrelated items I read, yesterday and today, got me thinking about how games can be all over the news for a while and then quietly disappear without anyone really noticing. Or mentioning it if they did.

The first was this from MassivelyOP about server merges in Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. It took me somewhat by surprise, for several reasons. 

For one, I couldn't remember hearing anything about server merges in the game before, although the article is very much "Here's a thing we knew might happen and now it has". Pantheon is in that odd position for me of being a game I don't play but whose news I watch with interest so I was a little puzzled that I'd missed whatever had passed for a warning about the contraction. 

It seems MOP reported on the possibility back in March in a round-up of various topics concerning the game. I definitely never saw it because I'd have remembered Chris Neal's opening paragraph, one of the oddest I've seen anywhere for quite a while. It's worth following the link to check it out. It's like he's channeling Chris Morris from thirty years ago...

I imagine I missed it because I was deep in a hole of my own digging as described in yesterday's post but had I caught the news I'd have been surprised to learn Pantheon had enough servers to warrant a merger. In fact, had anyone asked me, which obviously no-one was going to, I'd have said I thought they probably had just one server for each ruleset. I wouldn't have thought they could need much more.

If I'd said that, I'd have been very wrong indeed. Yesterday's report names twenty servers! And that's just in the USA East and West regions, which seem to be the only ones affected by the merger. There are also servers in the EU and "OCE", an abbreviation for Oceania I hadn't happened upon before. Plus another two FFA PvP servers that have just been added. That's more than two dozen!

Things Are Happening!

 

It seems like one whole hell of a lot of servers to me. Way, way more than I imagined the game could possibly support at this stage, even though the take-up when it went into Early Access was a lot more enthusiastic than I'd expected.

The Steam charts show an all-time peak just below 7,000 concurrent players. Even using the most generous of multipliers, 5X, that puts the population around 35k. I just checked and as far as I can tell it is no longer possible to play the game any other way than through Steam unless you already have pre-existing alpha/beta access or a buddy code from someone who does, so it seems reasonable to assume Steam's population count represents the huge majority of the playerbase.

If so, that means each of those two dozen or more servers would have been unlikely to have held more than a couple of thousand people (Assuming a fairly even distribution.) and probably only half of those at most would have been online at the same time, even at peak. I know Pantheon is a retro game, aiming to bring back the glory days of EverQuest and all that but even at the turn of the millennium I seem to remember EQ servers could comfortably accommodate about five thousand players, with a couple of thousand of those online at the same time. It seems to be going beyond the call of authenticity to try and replicate the server technology from two decades ago as well as the gameplay.

In the course of my "research" I naturally ended up looking at the Steam Charts for Pantheon as they are now. It's not a disastrous picture but it's not as encouraging as it might be. 

The game has been in Early Access for around three months, putting it squarely in that ninety day zone identified by the developers of the Star Wars Galaxy emulator as the point when people begin to jump ship if no new content is forthcoming. 

You can have too many new ideas...

Pantheon, as I said, seeks to restore the kind of gameplay, and thereby the kind of retention and loyalty, that golden age MMORPGs such as EverQuest once enjoyed. Back then, players really did expect to play these games for many months at a stretch; often for several years. It wasn't until a decade or so later that the term "three-monther" appeared, referring to the then-new tendency of players to hop from one MMORPG to another, abandoning each after no more than three months.

That had a lot to do with the explosion of new MMORPGs, which made it possible to put one down and pick up another almost without interruption. Before then, there just weren't enough MMORPGs to make chasing FOMO a viable playstyle but many players had been quite happy to stick with one game because, in addition to all those legendary social ties and as I can affirm as someone who was playing at the time, successful MMOs pumped out a continual torrent of fresh content in a way that would seem hard to believe now.

It's not just rose-tinted nostalgia talking. It's a matter of record. You can go read the extensive patch note archive at Allakhazam's mothballed EverQuest site and see for yourself. Back then, when I was playing, the problem was trying to keep up with the new stuff, not scratching around trying to find something new to make it worth logging in.

As I've suggested before, to a degree Early Access games have an advantage over live ones in this regard. By definition, there's still a lot to add to an EA title, assuming the devs are doing their jobs. There really ought to be a steady flow of new content throughout the EA period, although not all of it is likely to be particularly exciting. There may still be a lot of tweaking of detail and systems work going on. Even so, there should always be something new happening.

For that reason and because of the type of game Pantheon promotes itself as being and the kind of audience it seeks to attract, I'd figured retention would be more robust than it appears to have been. I imagined quite a lot of Pantheon players would be in it for the long haul and would already have settled down in their "forever game", as people like to call it. They'd keep on playing, regardless of whether there was anything new to do because Pantheon would be home.

That's most likely true still for some but it looks as though there may also have been quite an intake of curiosity-seekers and tourists. Peak concurrency according to Steam has fallen from that all-time high of close to seven thousand back in January to just over half that in the last thirty days; less than a third in the last twenty-four hours. That leaves a couple of thousand at peak, which with that generous 5x multiplier might mean as many as ten thousand people still playing, still a decent number for an indie mmo. 

Not a disastrous decline, then, but a bigger slide than I would have predicted at this stage. Certainly a steep-enough drop to warrant those server merges, although given they cut the total of American  PvE servers from twenty to just four, it does suggest there were too many to begin with.

The "Latest" News as of 10 April 2025

 

The other news item I referred to back at the top of the post relates not to any kind of announcement giving cause for concern, more the exact opposite: total silence. Michael Byrne of MMOBomb is wondering if Tarisland is "unofficially dead" because he hasn't heard a peep out of it "in months".

That's a bit of a reach as it turns out if you read the whole article because the "months" of supposed silence actually go back only as far as mid-February, which is more like "weeks" to my way of counting. Still, it's long enough to go without any type of PR puff from a major game to suggest something might be going on. Or not going on...

Tarisland is precisely one of those MMORPGs that dominated the news cycle for a while before slipping quietly back into the pack of live service games that no-one really follows or cares about other than the people still playing them. Lost Ark would be another example but the huge difference there is that I still see news items about Lost Ark all the time whereas I had to go look up what the last reports on Tarisland were before I wrote this post. I couldn't remember hearing about it for, yes, months.

We can't use Steam's charts to reveal anything meaningful about Tarisland because although it's on Valve's platform, pretty much no-one ever played it there in the first place. The all-time peak was 582 players! As MMOBomb suggests, most current Tarisland players will be going through the game's standalone launcher or playing it on mobile. It may still be booming for all any of us know.

Except if it was, I'm pretty sure Level Infinite and TenCent would be telling us about it. And pumping out plenty of content to make sure it stayed that way. As with EQ back in the day and as with Wuthering Waves now, just to name-check a game I play that pushes far more content at me than I can cope with (High quality content, too.) MMORPGs that are doing well don't tend to clam up and keep quiet about it.

In some ways, Pantheon and Tarisland sit almost at opposite ends of the MMORPG spectrum, even though in others they could be cousins. One is extremely indie and still in relatively early development, the other is as corporate as they come and went Live long ago. Then again, both are basically diku-mud variants that can trace a very direct lineage back to EverQuest, one directly, the other by way of World of Warcraft.

If I had to bet which would be with us longer I'd put my money on Pantheon. I wouldn't have said that before I read Micheal Byrne's speculations but I do find the developer's and publisher's lack of engagement with both the players and the media suggestive of a general lack of commitment to the game itself. Hardly surprising given the size and scope of the mega-corps involved, for whom Tarisland may well already have either met or missed its profitability targets, consigning it either way to the completed projects file.

Pantheon, conversely, is the one and only engine keeping the Visual Realms ship afloat. If that fails, the entire company sinks. Tarisland could probably have fifty times as many players and TenCent might still shut it down. VR won't give up until the bailiffs are banging on the door.

As a player, it does seem counterintuitive to imagine your characters would be safer in some niche game that may never even make it out of Early Access, rather than in one of the biggest MMORPGs of its day, but that might very well be how it goes.

What A Difference A Year Makes... Or Doesn't

I was halfway through a post about how the Tarisland launch wasn't going so great, when I tried logging in for a second time and found most of my problems had been of my own making. In my defence, the whole login procedure does feel like a bit of a mess and definitely more so than it was in beta. 

There was one big plus - I was able to patch up the beta client and use that for the Live Launch without having to start over from scratch. After that it all got a bit confusing. 

I took advantage of yesterday's pre-launch update window, using my email and password from beta and that all worked fine. Then this morning, a couple of hours after the game went Live, I tried to use the same details to log in and they wouldn't go through. 

I tried logging in through Google using the same email address instead, which entailed re-authorising the account. That may or may not have duplicated my registration, I'm not sure. I didn't get a new notification so probably not.

If at first you don't succeeed...

Whichever account it was that I logged into, it was able to get as far as server select but there I was stymied by two messages, One told me the Recommended server (EU2) was down for maintenance and the other that the original (EU1) was full. 

All the time this was happening, the introductory video, complete with bombastic music and voice acting to match, was playing on a loop in the background. I think I heard the whole thing all the way through at least three times. It made it very hard to concentrate so it's quite likely I missed something or messed something up. 

I guess it must either have been that or the maintenance was just about to finish because when I tried again a few minutes later, intending to check the sequence of events for the post I was writing, I was able to log in right away. All of that didn't put me in the best frame of mind to be impressed and neither as it turned out did what |I saw when I got into the game. 

I first played Tarisland almost a year ago, on 27 June 2023. I was very positive about the experience.  "The whole thing feels rock solid", "I felt like I was home!" and "I had a very good time" were just a few of the compliments I handed the game back then.

I wonder if Stylist Tony has any red hair dye?

Here's where the old "Better in beta" thing (First cousin to the Early Access paradox.) raises its grizzled head. If I had such a good time a year ago, will I still have that good a time now, when nothing feels quite so fresh and new?

It's too early to say for sure but my money's on no. Not because the game's changed. If anything, more because it hasn't. I mean, they've had a year so I imagine they;'ve done something with the time but I just skimmed that First Impression post and everything I said then still holds true so whatever they've been working on it clearly wasn't the starting experience. The difference is, this time I'm not likely to be pleasantly surprised by how good the game is - I'm much moe likely to be mildly disappointed it's not better.

I'm not going to go over the same ground again, though. I paid the first thirty levels or so some pretty good attention last year and I bet there's not much different about them now. Not much point rehashing the experience unless I find something different to say about it.

I'll most likely skip "First Impressions" from here on in and just put Tarisland on the "Posts About Stuff I'm Doing In Games I Play" pile, at least until I run into something I haven't written about already.

What I am going to do, probably unfairly, is briefly compare and contrast Tarisland with another game in that stack, Wuthering Waves. The main reason it's not a fair comparison is that Tarisland is a full-fat MMORPG, while Wuthering Waves is, at most, a co-op RPG. The way I'm playing it, it's a straight-up solo game. 

Dang! Wouldn't you just know it? My character's lost her memory - again!

That said, there are some strong similarities, not least that both games are translated, fully-voiced Chinese imports with open-world settings and cartoonish graphics. A year ago I described Tarisland's translations as "varied", something I also think would be a fit description of the English version of Wuthering Waves. The difference between the two is that the translatio in WW varies from exceptional to average import standard, whereas my immediate impression of Tarisland this morning was much less generous.

I think what's happened here is that my benchmark for a good translation has been raised by a few titles I've played since I was in that first Tarisland beta, particularly Wuthering Waves and Once Human. Neither of those is anything like as good as they could be - I've yet to play any translated F2P title that maintains a naturalstic English tone throughout - even the best of them have wonky passages - but they both have moments that impress. 

The real worry, however, is that the translations that make the best showing do so in the early stages, where a lot of care has clearly been taken to get someone who does genuinely speak modern, demotic English to give the final version a polish. They all tend to drift down to something closer to Google Translate later on but Tarisland's translation is already slipping a little right out of the gate, with some infelicitous phrasing and text that doesn't match what's being said.

Now that looks weirdly familiar...

Graphically, Tarisland does look good but not, in my opinion, as good as Wuthering Waves, which continues to make me happy just to look at it. Once again I feel as though my own preferences may have altered in the last twelve months. The fact is, I've watched a lot of anime since then and played a fair amount of anime-inflected games. I think I have slightly less affection for the chunkier WoW-style look Tarisland affects than I did a year ago. 

Also, I think maybe it is an affectation. Looking at the screenshots I took today, there's a bit of a cut-and-shut feel to some of them, as if someone had grabbed some NPCs and scenery out of one game and pasted it into another. In the shot above, the grass and that mountain split down the middle could have come straight out of Wuthering Waves but in the shot below almost everything feels like it was lifted from the Tauren starting zone. They barely look like the same game.

The third comparison that doesn't go in Tarisland's favor is variety of content. TL is very much a HIgh Fantasy MMORPG with all that entails. The opening cinematic is ludicrously portentous and terrifyingly overwrought and from what I remember about the storyline, it's just one damn crisis after another and an awful lot of fights.

Push harder at the back or we're never getting up this hill!

By contrast, while Wuthering Waves also has plenty of that, it also has lots of saving cats from trees, posing for bad portrait painters, parkour, puzzles, theater performances and all kinds of nonsense. I'm starting to realise I might be more interested in saving cats than saving the world. Is that bad?

None of these potential drawbacks is going to stop me playing Tarisland. I liked it plenty last year and I'm sure I'll find a lot to enjoy there still. I could certainly do with a tab-target MMORPG I haven't sucked all the juice out of yet and this one will do just fine, for now. I don't think I'll be clocking up four-hour sessions every day but I'm sure I'll keep noodling away at it indefinitely.

And that's about all I have to say about it for now. I really just wanted to record the fact that the game launched and I played it. From here on it's just going to be another game I play, sometimes.

Probably.

Why I'm Not Playing WoW Right Now (Like I Thought I Would Be)

For all my enthusiasm over World of Warcraft's Pandaria Remix, I haven't gone ahead and re-upped my sub. I keep thinking about it but then I remember I'm paying for EverQuest II and not playing that either. It's not like I begrudge the money but there does come a point when you have to ask yourself if spending more is really the smart thing to do.

I'm not going to rehash all the familiar arguments for and against various payment models, nor even remark once again on the ever-growing realization that, as consumers, we're screwed if we pay, screwed if we don't. If anyone needs a final confirmation that no-one owns anything any more, even when they've paid for it and taken it home in a box, look no further than Spotify's short-lived entry into the hardware market, the Must Have Been Named By A Teletubby Car Thing. 

I am not a Spotify user. The service they provide doesn't fit well with the way I listen to music so I've never even considered subscribing. Until fairly recently, I didn't have much of an opinion about the company either way. I don't tend to waste a lot of time pondering the worth of services I don't use or plan on using. 

All the same, it's hard to avoid hearing plenty about the Swedish company. I read a lot of music news and the name comes up over and over again. Of late, that reporting has skewed hard towards the negative.

 Q1 revenue this year was up 20%, immediately following a cull of 17% of its workforce in December. That sort of thing always goes down well with shareholders. Everyone else? Not so much.

Since making money is the primary purpose of business, there are always plan to increase the yield.  In Spotify's case, there was talk of a "Supremium" level of service, intended to raise subscription rates even further, but apparently that was torpedoed by consumer resistance. It seems there is a temperature at which the frogs start to jump out of the pot after all.

Until yesterday, by far the most controversial of Spotify's recent business moves was the decision to stop paying royalties on any track listed on the platform if it receives fewer than a thousand plays per year. This has been widely reported as an attack on independent music-makers although, as Spotify points out, seemingly without either irony or self-awareness, a thousand streams earns you less than $3.

Bad though that looks, yesterday's news that the company is about to brick its own, dedicated, in-car device, the Car Thing, beats it hands-down for self-inflicted bad PR. It's almost up there with Apple's disastrous piano-crushing commercial.

At least Apple's PR department had the sense to walk that one back once they saw the reaction it got. There's been no indication of Spotify enjoying even that degraded sense of self-preservation. 

Not only will the devices they sold, apparently for $50-$100 dollars a time, cease to work entirely just before the end of this year, there will be no refunds and no alternatives. Spotify helpfully suggests you recycle yours because of course they care about stuff like that...

You might argue that, for a piece of consumer electronics that was only available for around five months a couple of years ago, that's not a wholly untenable position. Nothing last forever, after all, The U.S. Federal Trade Commission might not agree. They seem to think that if you sell someone a thing it ought to last more than five minutes. Luddites!

Inevitably, a class action suit has already been raised. Whether or not that gains legal traction, brand damage has already been done. Not that Spotify probably cares. This is clearly one more tone-deaf marketing decision from a company that doesn't seem to hold much concern for what its customers or anyone else thinks about it. 

Lest there be any lingering, residual doubt in anyone's mind about just how far removed Spotify corporate is from anywhere that could even remotely be described as "in touch with popular opinion", let me just quote the stated reason they've given as to why they very briefly entered, then just as quickly exited, the arena of automotive audio products in the first place:

“The goal of our ‘Car Thing’ exploration in the US was to learn more about how people listen in the car.”

So it was all for science. An experiment, carried out using other people's money. And, presumably, their data, although I imagine all rights to that are waived in the EULA when you sign up for a Spotify account.

Not that any of us own anything any more. Certainly we don't own our games. Not if they require an internet connection to play and not even if they don't, according to Valve. You may be able to play Nightingale offline now but don't let that give you any funny ideas about who owns the game you paid for. I'll give you a clue: it's not you.

It can't be, can it? If it was, you'd be able to bequeath your Steam games to your heirs. Yeah, that's not happening. As the NME helpfully points out, there are ways around the problem, such as taping your password to your PC before you gasp your last. That way your games can be handed down the generations like the family heirlooms they will literally have become. As the article blithely puts it, "Steam can’t prove a bunch of 135-year-olds aren’t still playing games."

I suppose one thing you can say about the good old MMORPG subscription model is that at least it's clear. We grizzled vets may have shelves of cardboard boxes and stacks of shiny discs to prove we went to the store around the turn of the millennium to buy EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot or Final Fantasy XI but we all knew those were nothing more than souvenirs. We owned the boxes but we never owned the games. Those we just rented at $14.99 a month.

The Free to Play revolution muddied the waters but even with the entry fee removed, no-one was fooled into thinking we owned anything more than we ever had. If the company chooses to shut the servers down the result is the same whether you were paying to play on them or not. 

All of that has something to do with why I haven't ponied up for a WoW sub, even though I was quite enjoying myself on my return but other factors are having considerably more impact on that decision. It's true I'm in a bit of a lull with MMORPGs just now but that's not going to last. I'm somewhat wary of subbing to WoW and then almost immediately finding I have other, more pressing gaming concerns to occupy my time.

The new EverQuest II Origins server opens next month, most likely just after Steam's Next Fest, and now Tencent have revealed the official launch date for Tarisland to be June 21st. As I mentioned yesterday, Once Human could go live as early as August and this morning I got an email from the people behind Genshin Impact, telling me their new title, an "Urban Fantasy ARPG" by the name of  Zenless Zone Zero is set to relaease globally on 4 July.

That's pretty much got the whole summer covered and all of those I can either play for free or via a subscription I've already paid. Sure, I'd like to play WoW but would I want to play it more than all of those? It seems unlikely.

In the end, it probably doesn't matter all that much whether the games I play really belong to me, whether I'm just renting them or whether I'm getting them for free. What counts is whether I'm going to play them or not. And it looks like I'm not going to be playing WoW after all.

Sign-Up Season Begins

You don't see a sign-up form for weeks and then three come along all at once...

Tarisland Revs Up

For launch. Sometime. Would be nice if we had an actual date but you can't have everything.  According to MassivelyOP we can rule out 14 June, at least. Hardly surprising since that's a Friday. When did any game ever launch on a Friday? (Cue comments listing all the famous games that did indeed launch on a Friday...)

I'm not sure I'd call June "near" but I suppose its all context. Everything is context. Since I was already registered from the closed betas last year, I wasn't sure if I'd need to "Sign Up" again but I figured it would be best to check. 

Just as well I did. I used the same email address and my application was accepted as if it was the first time Level Infinite had ever seen it so I'm guessing we're starting over as though we've never met.

I'd make some observations here about whether or not I'm likely to play Tarisland and if so how seriously and for how long but June might as well be the year 3000 as far as that goes. If I'd made book at New Year on what games I'd be playing until Easter I'd have lost my Gunsmith Cats tee. Come the launch, I could be playing anything so I'm making no promises.

That said, I did like Tarisland quite a bit. It's retro enough to feel nostalgic but modern enough not to come across as old-fashioned. It does feel a bit generic in places but it zips along and it's fun to play so why not? Also, I imagine it will be the new hotness for at least five minutes and I'd like the blog to bask in that heat, so it'd take something big to stop me at least giving it a run, I think.

Throne and Liberty Goes West

Apparently a lot of people have been angsting about not being able to play this one since the it launched in South Korea last December. I can't say I've been paying much attention although I did vaguely remember the name. Yesterday there was finally news of a playable opportunity for everyone outside the current launch region as sign-ups opened for a global closed beta starting on 10 April. 

In something of an autonomic reaction I immediately went to register but balked at having to input my Amazon account details. I'd completely forgotten the game was being published by Amazon here. While I was checking it was all legit, I discovered the beta is under NDA so that was the end of that. 

If I was desperate to play I'd have sucked it up and signed but given the only reason I was even looking at the beta was in the hope of squeezing a few blog posts out of the experience, there really wouldn't have been much point. I'll wait until they drop the NDA or go into open beta or maybe even actually launch the damn thing.

The whole thing did have the effect of making me curious about Throne and Liberty in a way I wasn't before, so at least there's that. As far as I can tell the game still has no launch window more specific than "soon". I'm wondering what the heck they need to do to it to make it ready, given it's already up and running in some territories.

I watched the trailer, flipped through the screen shots and read the description on Steam. It looks like every other imported MMORPG of the last six or seven years to me, albeit marginally prettier. My PC doesn't meet even the minimum specs but then that's true of plenty of games I play with no issues at all. I got very lucky with my CPU, it seems. It always outperforms benchmarks.

I'll give T&L a go when it comes out of NDA, anyway. It's on Steam and it's free so why not? Can't imagine I'll play for more than a handful of sessions but at least it'll give me a chance to write some First Impressions posts. I do love doing those.

Palia Steams In

Whoop, and if you'll pardon me, de-do. I mean, I'm not complaining. As we've discussed before, it's very handy to have all the games under one roof. I am a Steam convert if not actually a Steam fan. 

I haven't played Palia since... hmm. Let me check... looks like last August. If you asked me I wouldn't say I'd given up on it but I never seem to find any reason to log in. Until last night.

As soon as I saw the news, I went to Steam to download the client and... it wasn't available. I was too early! I added it to my wishlist and forgot about it... for all of five minutes, after which I got an email from Steam telling me it was available. That's what I call service!

I started the download running but what I wanted to know was whether I'd have to begin again from scratch or whether I'd be able to transfer my existing character and progress to my Steam account. I spent a good while googling that without finding any useful information at all so when the big, green PLAY button lit up I thought I'd just click it and see what would happen. 

It wasn't as though I'd gotten very far last time. Or at least I didn't think I had. I couldn't actually remember how far I had got. Anyway, starting over didn't seem like it would be much of a problem.

As it turns out it wasn't any kind of a problem at all because I didn't have to do it. You can indeed carry on from where you left off. Steam pretty much does all ther admin for you, too. A window popped up asking if I wanted to link my Steam and Singularity 6 accounts. I said I did, found my old login and password, entered them in the relevant fields and that was all there was to it. Slick and quick.

If there was a problem, it didn't come from the process. It came from the game. I can't recall the last time I logged into a game I haven't played for a while and felt my mood slump so fast. Almost from the moment I was in I wanted to leave. 

So I did. My current played time for Palia on Steam is five minutes. It may well stay that way, possibly forever. There's nothing actively wrong with Palia that I can put my finger on... I just find it stiflingly dull. 

Dull to look at and dull to play. I don't even think it's an issue with the implementation; I think it's the genre. 

According to the description on the Steam store page, Palia is a "a cozy community sim MMO made for you and your friends". I don't have any friends to play Palia with and frankly I don't want to get any. I find it hard to imagine how doing the things you can do in Palia with other people would make doing those things any more interesting than doing them alone. They just aren't very interesting to me, period, and that's an end to it.

It's not that it's the kind of gameplay I find intrinsically uninteresting. Other than the lack of combat, there's little fundemental difference between the activities on offer in Palia and those in Nightingale. There is quite a difference in the visuals and the setting, though, and it's clear that Nightingale's world appeals to me aesthetically in a way Palia's does not. Palia's world is also tiny compared to Nightingale's, which makes the explorer in me sad. 

Still, I think the real difference between them lies in the word "cozy".

I love being cozy. I like to sit in my comfy chair with the fire blazing and Beryl snoozing on the rug beside me. It's the very image of coziness. Virtual coziness, though? Is that appealing? Isn't it literally emulating on screen what I'm experiencing in real life? Don't we play to experience something different? Something thrilling, even.

I know I frequently claim I don't appreciate challenge in my games but what I mean by that is challenge that makes me tense, anxious or stressed. Challenge that falls well within my capabilities feels satisfying. Palia, from what I remember of it from last summer, manages to be both unchallenging and yet still  low-key stressful by way of its annoyingly awkward gameplay, while not providing much in the way of intellectual curiosity, emotional engagement or excitement by way of compensation

It's not so much cozy as dull, that's how I remember it and five minutes there last night brought all of that dullness back. I'm not saying I won't play it any more but I can't say I have any immediate plans. Still, it's there on Steam if I want it, now, which has to increase the chances somewhat.

Now if Once Human would just... oh, wait a moment...

The Tarisland Devs Would Like To Tell You: They're Listening...

This morning I watched a video, brought to my attention by MMOBomb, in which Tencent, developers of upcoming, would-be WoW-beater Tarisland, addressed some of what they see as the key issues brought to their attention by the latest closed beta. As an endearingly unprofessional voice, possibly one of the developers themselves, falteringly read aloud the same words I could see for myself on screen, I found myself wondering whether I'd missed an invite to another round of testing. Or maybe never been chosen to receive one.

I was sufficiently puzzled to go check on the game's official website, where I discovered that the most recent beta had indeed been the one I played back in November. I hadn't missed out on a third opportunity to give the much-anticipated title another once-over. I can now go back to looking forward to doing that later in the year, always assuming they're kind enough to ask me.

It would certainly have been a surprise if there had been another beta since the last one, seeing that test only ended in November. Hardly time to fit in another round, what with Christmas and New Year. What made me think it might have happened were the specific questions the video attempted to answer, most of which address concerns I had no idea anyone had, over systems and mechanics I didn't realise existed. It did seem as though I must have missed a trick, somewhere.

On closer examination, it appears I just didn't happen to come into contact with most of the potential problems because they relate to things I didn't bither with during my not-insignificant time with the game. Some of that is entirely understandable, some less so. 

For example, one section of the video deals with PvP. It's no surprise I wasn't aware that players complained there weren't enough opportunities for players to beat each other up or that there were shortcomings in the matchmaking process. I vaguely knew the game had some form of PvP because there's an annoying pop-up in the never-ending Tutorial that keeps suggesting you go check it out, but I never took the trouble to find out what it was like or even where you went to do it.

Which isn't to say that I wouldn't give it a go if the game was live. I've spent a lot of hours in battlegrounds in theme-parks like World of Warcraft, Rift, EverQuest II and Warhammer Online and mostly had a good time, even though I do think of instanced PvP as the candy of MMORPGs - moreish at first but too much and it makes you feel queasy. In a limited-duration beta, though, I'd have to be very short of better options to spend time running around playing digital laser-tag. It certainly wouldn't have said anything very good about the game if I had.

It's also perhaps not all that odd that I wasn't aware that in beta you could get comparable or even better gear by crafting instead of raiding. If it's unlikely that I'd experiment with PvP in a beta, it's all but impossible to imagine I'd find myself raiding. I don't do raids in live games - why would I want to test them?

I do craft, though, so I suppose I might have found out that way. Only, as Tencent themselves have acknowledged, feedback indicates not all players love to craft: "Some players find Crafting to be too complex and time-consuming", which is why the whole thing is going to be "simplified". You can call it "dumbed down" if you like. They didn't and I don't think I will, either.

I did take a brief look at crafting while I was there but I didn't make much progress. It didn't feel like it was going to be particularly complicated but it did seem as if it might be quite tedious. There weren't that many recipes, so you'd have to keep making the same things and although I was surprised how fast some of  the fireworks I made sold, there didn't seem to be an awful lot to make in the earlier levels that would be either interesting or profitable. 

Getting to the point where I could craft something genuinely exciting, like an Invincible Kitten mount, looked like it would take a lot more effort than I would have been willing to put in so I can't say I'm disappointed to hear the plan now is to make the whole thing quicker and easier. I'm increasingly of the opinion that complex crafting is a better fit for survival games than it is for narrative-driven, theme park MMORPGs, anyway.

The real reason I imagined I might have inadvertently skipped a round of testing came right at the start of the video, when the questions being asked and answered all revolve around things I either didn't remember or never knew were in the game at all. Take the "Inscribed Stone System", the vaguest of details about which are slowly starting to come back to me as I write. 

I recall it being some kind of augmentation you can add to your gear to make it more powerful or give it extra functions and features. Lots of games have something similar and I confess it didn't make much of an impression on me at the time. It seems others were a lot more concerned, particularly by the prospect of being allowed to buy and trade Inscribed Stone Energy, fearing it would lead to some sort of Pay-to-Win scenario. 

Tencent has been running scared of the "P2W" tag since the day Tarisland was announced. There have already been some skirmishes between the developers and the playerbase (Curently defined as people who shout a lot about the game on Reddit and Discord, without necessarily having played in any of the tests.) over what constitutes "Pay To Win". If they work it out, maybe they'll tell the rest of us. 

Regardless of the outcome of those discussions, Tencent is determined not to allow anyone to pin the P2W label on this particular system, so from now on the stuff won't be tradable. Moreover, in order to discourage players from "playing too long", there will be a cap on how much ISE you can get per day. 

Playing too much does seem to be something Chinese game developers worry about, although I'm going to stick my neck out and say they're only really bothered about the home market. I very much doubt they care whether Europeans or Americans spend all day, every day, in front of the screen, especially if it involves them spending more Euros and Dollars. Or maybe that's too cynical. I don't know...

I did at least manage to dredge a few details about the Inscribed Stone System up from the swamps of my memory, when prompted. The other two economic issues featured in the video I don't recall at all. One is Gold Coins, which I'm guessing is the in-game currency. I mean, I knew Tarisland was on the gold standard, like virtually every fantasy rpg ever, but I wasn't aware it had any special significance. 

According to the feedback recap in the video, players felt it was too hard to get gold, meaning when the game goes live there could be a problem with bots and gold sellers or as Tencent prefer to call them "illegal program users". It seems that in attempting to pre-empt this problem by limiting Gold Coins to "more challenging" encounters, Tencent "pushed their guard" a little too far, something they intend to remedy in future by employing "more technical means" of countering those pesky illegal program users and by making Gold Coins easier to get for everyone else.

To which I can only say - good luck with that!

The other potentially game-breaking inclusion in the last beta, at least according to the feedback Tencent received, relates to something called CBT Benefits Cards. I have absolutely no idea what these are or were. I never saw any mention of them and as far as I know I never received any, unless it's jargon for those handouts every game throws at players just for logging in. 

Whatever they were, they were tradeable through the in-game Auction House, which sent people into a tizzy. There was great concern expressed over whether CBT cards would be included in the official launch, when the game goes live. 

Now, I would have thought that was a question that answered itself. What would you you imagine CBT would stand for if not "Closed Beta Test"? Obviously, these cards were specific to the testing process, something the video confirms. Still, just in case it was keeping you up at night, be reassured: no, Closed Beta Test Benefits Cards will not be included in the official launch version of Tarisland!

The last piece of feedback addressed by the video that I want to mention is the reaction to the dungeons in the game and the way they can be accessed. I did do a couple of dungeons, albeit only because there are points in the Main Storyline Quest when you have no choice, and I thought they were pretty good, as these things go but apparently some people - inevitably - complained they were too easy.

Other people kvetched about the time restrictions. Unlike in most Western MMORPGs, you can't just chain-run dungeons in Tarisland until your eyeballs bleed. There's an energy or access mechanic, which the video just refers to as "dungeon attempts" that once again seeks to put a brake on players whose enthusiasm for the game might verge on the self-destructive. 

It seems that the combination of easy basic dungeons and limited attempts per day led players to concentrate on knocking out as many lower-difficulty Arcane Realms as they could, while swerving the more challenging Elite Dungeons. This in turn pissed off the hardcore, who couldn't get groups for the tough stuff. I'd like to say First World Problems but...

Hearing all this in the video, my own selfish concern was that Tencent would respond by making the Arcane Realms harder to appease the concerns of the hardcore. If they did, you could hardly blame them, seeing that would be the demographic most likely to pay the bills. Hearteningly, however, their reponse was much more nuanced, taking into account the requirements of both sides. 

They're going to consider separating the two kinds of dungeons so each uses its own "Dungeon Attempts". They also want to avoid making dungeon-play grindy, instead keeping it focused on being a fun way to level. Instead of making the Arcane Realm harder across the board they're going to give it a Challenge Mode with cosmetic rewards, while leaving the regular version much as it is (Although they do mention making it "more fun", which adds an ominous note to the proceedings...)

There's a fair amount more in the video, which manages to pack a lot into less than ten minutes. There's more about crafting and also an acknowledgement that they may have gone a little overboard in the "exploration" stakes, by which I think they mean PoIs and mini-events, which did indeed come thick and fast in closed beta.

All in all, I found the video largely reassuring, particularly when taken in conjunction with the earlier feedback report published in mid-December. Tate one covered many of the same points and also confirmed there'll be no gender-locking of classes in the final build. I get the feeling Tencent are attempting to rediscover that sweet spot WoW enjoyed around the time of Wrath of the Lich King, when it seemed for a brief while as if the same MMORPG could appeal equally to casual and hardcore players, without short-changing either.

That's a tough one to pull off but I hope they can do it. And even if they can't, good on them for trying.

Always Look On The Bright Side - More Tarisland CB2 First Impressions

MassivelyOP has a First Impressions piece up about the second Tarisland Open Beta that broadly correlates with my own experience so far. It's a tad more critical than I would have been but that's not surprising. These days, I often find reviews of just about anything - games, books, movies, albums, TV shows - harsher than I'd be.

It seems to me the older I get, the more tolerant I become, which I thought was the opposite of how that was meant to go. I can't tell if it's the wisdom of experience, slipping standards or just that I can't be bothered to get worked up about stuff that doesn't much matter the way I could when I was young sprat of fifty or so. 

Whichever it is, I like to think it's an improvement. Still, it's always worth bearing in mind, when you read anything here these days, I'm probably giving a pass to stuff more rigorous critics would call out - and that applies double to MMORPGs, where I find myself very easily pleased compared to how I would have felt a decade ago. So long as a game keeps me amused for an hour or two and doesn't make me swear at the screen I'm most likely good with it.

Which just about sums up my experience with Tarisland. Although I haven't been posting about it much, I have been playing the beta every day and enjoying it. Chris Neal at MOP calls Tarisland "middling but a solid and fun game" and that's about where I'm at wih it, too. 

One area where I would slightly disagree with Chris is in the localization, which he finds "as rushed and machine translated as most of the dialogue out of Black Desert. I haven't played Black Desert for a long time and I can't remember exactly what the English translation was like there but leaving specific game-by-game comparisons aside, I wouldn't say Tarisland's translation was bad.

It's not good. Don't get me wrong on that. It's inconsistent, for a start. It's apparent different individuals or teams have worked on different text delivery systems, so the feel and sound of in-game documents, quest dialog and voiceover can sometimes differ noticeably in both idiom and fluency. 

Also, Tarisland suffers from that somewhat annoying quirk common to almost all MMORPGs, translated or otherwise, that have both written dialog and someone speaking it, which is that the words you're hearing don't always mach the ones you see on the screen. It's perhaps unusual in that neither the written nor the spoken version has the edge over the other. They're both generally okay but it can be distracting all the same and it does look a little unprofessional, even if every game does do it.

By the general standards of English localizations of Korean and Chinese games, though, Tarisland comes in well above par. I can't think of a single time I literally couldn't understand the meaning and very few incidences of glaring grammatical errors or mangled syntax. Mostly it's that constant awareness that you're reading or listening to people saying things in a way that doesn't feel entirely natural or authentic.

And that's what's so weird about it, given Tarisland's unacknowledged but widely-recognized role model: I've always felt almost exactly the same way about the stiff, oddly formal sentence structure and inauthentic demotics of much of the quest text in World of Warcraft. That game often feels as if it's been written by a partiularly stuffy academic so in a peculiar way, Tarisland's stiff localization brings it closer to its source material than a springier, zingier, snappier conversational style ever could.

Chris is also a lot harder on the storyline than I would be, calling it "shoddy at the best of times". Well, it is. There's no arguing with that. Where I'd differ is in expecting anything better. Frankly, the story in almost every MMORPG I've ever played could quite reasonably be described as "shoddy at the best of times". The genre isn't the place to go for narrative depth, originality or nuance. I count myself lucky if the story even makes sense!

All the central stories in most MMORPGs are really there for is to act as a rack of hooks on which to hang combat instances and levelling opportunities. It's true some developers - Square Enix would be the first to come to mind - like to think of their games as story engines but the more successful at that goal they become, the more likely they are to drive players to skip the cut scenes or at least go make a sandwich while they wait for them to be over.

I've mellowed somewhat on story in MMORPGs, something I used to consider actively harmful to my enjoyment of the game, but I'm nowhere even close to wanting to have to wade through a sludge of ponderous, portentous, self-important narrative just to get to the next quest objective. I like my MMORPG stories to know their place and stick to the Three Fs - fast, functional and, if possible, funny.

Tarisland's questing gets two Fs on its report card. It zips along and it does a great job of getting me to new parts of the map I might not visit otherwise. As for funny, though, I couldn't exactly say it's a rib-tickler. I'm trying to remember a single intentionally amusing moment in either the MSQ or any of the many side-quests I'ver done and so far I'm coming up blank.

The MSQ is as melodramatic as you'd expect. It's one long existential crisis, studded with betrayals, revelations and dust-ups. As Chris suggests, it's main strength is some decently memorable NPCs - I really like Princess Catherine and Lorne's not bad - but the plot is pretty much the same plot as every MMORPG ever: everyone's relying on you, the player character, even though you just fell from the sky and no-one, least of all you, knows who or what you are. Now go find these McGuffins and save the world!

The side quest are a bit more interesting, if only in how reliably mawkish and sentimental they can be. Every MMORPG has a quest where you have to re-unite estranged lovers or act as a matchmaker or help someone commemorate a dead loved one but Tarisland sometimes seems to have nothing else. Oh, wait, yes it does. It has numerous NPCs who've carelessly lost something and need you, a perfect stranger, to get it back.

It feels like those tropes cover about 80% of all the side-quests I've done in my 33 levels so far. And honestly, it's fine. I've read all the quest text - yes, ever word of every quest I've taken - and I can remember, oh, probably two or three of them. I was interested enough in the stories they tell for exactly as long as it took me to kill the mobs or grab the items and bring them back and then I wasn't remotely interested any more. And that's just how it should be. 

Another area of the game Chris dismisses as not really worth the time and effort is crafting and gathering. I was going to do a post about that part of the game at one point but now I'm not. 

The gathering is about the same as it is in most games. If you like it in WoW or EverQuest II, you'll like it here. If you don't, this isn't going to change your mind. Crafting also looks like it's going to be fairly boilerplate but also sufficiently slow and grindy that I'm not about to devote the time to it in a beta that would allow me to make any meaningful comments on how it works, let alone whether it's any fun.

One innovation I haven't seen elsewhere and which I thought was both useful and intriguing occurs right at the start of your crafting career. When you follow the quest that sends you to speak to the various Crafting Guilds so you can choose your tradeskill (There are five but you can only learn one.) the game tells you just how popular with other players on your server each of them is. 

Since Tarisland is aiming for a largely player-driven economy, in which crafted goods will play a major part, that's potentially a highly significant piece of information and one I can't recall any other game having told me before. Since this is a beta, I picked the least-popular, Artisan, which equates to Engineering in WoW or Tinkering in EQII.

If this was Live, I wouldn't have touched it with a ten-foot pole. I'd have gone for Tailoring so I could make my own bags. Instead, I was swayed by the notion of being able to craft my very own Invincible Kitten mount. Obviously, since that's a high-end luxury item, I was never actually going to be able to make one in practice but I liked the idea that I could in theory. 

All of which speculation and hypothesis raises the question of whether I will play Tarisland when it goes Live. And the answer is... I'm not sure. I'll certainly play it  - it's F2P so why wouldn't I? But will I play it? Or, as Chris puts it in that First Impressions piece, does it "feel like a home game"?

Hmm. Probably not but only in the same way WoW doesn't feel like a "home game" for me. What WoW feels like is a "holiday home game"; a place I know and like and where I'll always be happy to visit and stay for a while but not a place I'd ever plan on settling down for good. I have a fairly lengthy list of games like that and as of now I can't see any good reason not to add Tarisland to that list, when it launches.

It's a fun game and I think it's likely to be quite successful. I can imagine we'll be hearing about it for many years to come and I wouldn't be surprised if some of that chatter comes from me, on occasion. I don't think it has any chance of becoming my next Guild Wars 2 or even my next Noah's Heart (Yep. Still playing.) but I'm betting it'll be in the mix, somewhere.

And that's why I'm probably not going to do all that much more in this or any future beta. I've already played through the first thirty or so levels twice and while there has been new content the second time around, most of what I've been doing has been repeating quests I did last time. I don't want to reach the point where I'm already burned out on the first thirty levels before I even get a permanent character.

That said, I am having fun, so I'm not going to stop altogether. I might just be a bit more circumspect about playing the beta "as live", which is what everyone seems to be doing. I get a strong sense there are plenty of people who wish Tarisland would just get on and launch already and I might be one of them.

DIng! Ding! Round Two! - Tarisland CB2 First Impressions

Tarisland Closed Beta 2 - Day Two. Ding 20!

It sounds like a lot but the first of the Day One goals for the Seven Day Goal Perk is "Reach Character Level 20" so I guess it's not.

Since this isn't Steam, I can't say exactly how long I've played so far. I was having fun so I wasn't counting the minutes but I'd guess it's been something like two or three hours altogether.

 Probably three. We'll say three.

By "Complete a craft" they mean "Choose one". It's a single click...

I was a few hours late logging in after the test started yesterday. When I got there, I was faced with a choice: a drop-down menu offering the option of making a character on the NA Server Cluster, EU or a couple of others. 

In the first Closed Beta, the UK defaulted to the North American servers but this time location trumped  language and I was pointed towards Europe. I demurred. My preference is always to play on American servers whenever possible. It's a cultural thing. Also my ping to the East Coast is fine. 

Tarisland isn't region locked, thankfully, so it was always going to be my decision, but there was another factor to consider. An indicator warned me how populated the servers were. The EU server was green; the NA server was amber. 

Actually, I think. It might have even have been red. I should have taken a screenshot. Anyway, it was clear NA was a lot busier than EU so I decided, since it was only a beta, to go against my principles and stay local. 

When I did, this is what I got:

Bait & Switch

That's the EU server. You can see it selected, faintly, at the bottom of the shot. 

Oh well. If I was going to have to wait, might as well wait for the server I actually wanted to be on. I cancelled and re-selected NA... and logged right in. No queue whatsoever.

Either I misread the population screen or the colors didn't mean what you'd think they'd mean or I should have submitted a bug report. One of those. Whatever. Didn't care. I was in. 

Next hurdle; make a character. 

I was perfectly happy with the Hunter Bard I played last time and I would have made her again, only I thought for the sake of the blog I probably ought to try one of the new classes. There was a bit of confusion when I thought the new ones were called "Phantom Necromancer" and "Shadow Swordsman" but I got that sorted out and picked the one I wanted.

You mean I have to carry this thing with me all the time?

The one I wasn't interested in is indeed the Shadow Swordsman. The one I was after, the one with the lantern and the moths, the one I wrote about in a post a few days ago, when I did in fact refer to her as the "Phantom Necromancer", is actually the Phantom Priest. 

She is a Necro, in that she summons undead, but she's also a healer. It's an interesting hybrid that reminds me a little of Vanguard's Bloodmage, although not a lot since, like all Tarisland's classes, it's nowhere near as original or unusual as that flattering comparison suggests.

Still, it's a decent class from what I've seen. The whole "Kills things with moths" thing that came up via the promo video turns out, sadly, not to be true. Well, it might be somewhere there in the visuals if you zoom in closely enough but moth-wrangling plays no substantive part in gameplay that I could see. The moth is a myth.

Tyler Edwards let drop the fascinating fact in the comments the other day that "purple emperor butterflies are attracted to corpses", something that turns out not just to be true but to be even weirder and more macabre than it sounds. Off the back of this startling revelation, I decided to call my new character Purple Empress. 

Butterfly in the rain.

I didn't expect to get that name and I didn't but only because it was too long. I thought again and with no more hope of success went for Butterfly. To my amazement, no-one had nabbed that yet, so Butterfly is who I am for the next two weeks.

Character creation didn't take long because there aren't all that many options. Once in game everything zipped along much the same as last time, at least from what I could remember, which was never going to be much when we're talking about something that happened four months ago. 

By the simple expedient of not reading any quest text, I got through the Tutorial and the section of storyline that takes place in the main city in something like less than half the time it took me before. I found I could remember roughly how the plot went and it all seemed about the same to me but if there were any subtle changes, I would have missed them, going at that pace. Probably not really pulling my weight there as a beta tester but hey, I filled out that long-ass survey again, so don't judge me!

All of that got me to Level 16 in my first session. After lunch today I played for another hour or so and made it as far as Level 20. Again, thngs seemed much the same, although crafting looked to have been hugely fleshed out and there was a whole new thing about Inscribed Stones. I'll probably cover those seperately in another post. I definitely have something to say about the crafting.

When I hear the name "Gaia", somehow I imagine something very different...

Once again, I was struck by just how slick the game is. It's very polished for a closed beta. Also very busy. I suspect this game is going to be quite popular. There were people everywhere. General chat was so crazy I had to tab out to Guild (I'm not in a guild so that was nice and quiet.)

It was apparent from the constant jabber on LFG and other channels that a lot of people aren't just goofing around in a silly beta for some game they'll never play again; they're setting themselves up for Live. Guilds weren't just recruiting, they were setting application criteria and touting their benefits, just like in a real game. The intention was clearly to build up a critical mass of members and hit the ground running whenever launch arrives.

When I filled out that survey, I made sure to tick every box that mentioned "casual" or "fun" or "explore" or "story". I get the strong feeling that Tarisland doesn't just want to look and feel like modern-day World of Warcraft, it wants to attract the same demographic so any effort I can make to mitigate against that happening seems like it would be worth it.

It's not the greatest story ever written but I'll take it over running dungeons any day.

The wild card here is cross-platform play. WoW does not have to concern itself with the different needs and desires of desktop and mobile players; Tarisland does. I'm not entirely sure how compatible those two broad groupings are. Since most everything has to be cross-platform these days, I guess we'll soon find out.

That's about as far as I've gotten up to now. I think I was either in the high 20s or low 30s when the last test ended so I have some way to go before I start seeing new content. I think I'd better slow down a tad and pace myself, not least so I can give myself a chance to notice if anything's changed.

Another reason to drop the pace is I have no real idea how to play this new class I've chosen. The Bard was much easier to come to grips with quickly. The Phantom Priest seems quite fiddly by comparison. I quite fancy joining LFG as a Healer but I'm going to have to read some tool-tips quite carefully before I try anything ambitious like that.

Meet here tomorrow and we'll carry on from where we left off.

Luckily, the class can dual-spec as DPS. I think that might be safer at first. No-one cares what the DPS is doing, especially in a beta.

One thing that's definitely the same as last time is I'm having fun. It's a very enjoyable game, at least for a week or two. I can already say that having just the one starting area and funnelling every character through the same questline is going to make alting very annoying, so I'm not sure I'd find a lot of replayability in Tarisland, but for a single character it looks like a potential runner.

And now, I'm off to kill a few gnolls, make a few levels and see if I can't get a better mount than this clumsy, great rhino. It's always nice to have goals.

More as I discover it. Until then...