The Sun Comes Up On Another Vision Of The Past

Stars Reach isn't the only game in alpha (Sorry... pre-alpha...) running lengthy testing sessions just now. Monsters & Memories is also ramping up towards reaching some kind of always-on state later in the year - or perhaps early next year - by keeping the servers up for longer and longer periods.

There's a "Community Alpha Test" on right now. It started on Sunday and it runs through this coming weekend. There's another one, even longer, due in November.

I like Monsters&Memories. I like their testing program, too, it seems. This is the ninth time I've posted about the game and eight of those posts are me talking about what I did during a test. 

It's a curious contrast with Stars Reach where, enthusiastic as I may have been at the beginning, that  enthusiasm has waned, along with my interest, until it feels like only a misplaced sense of duty and the hope of finding something to fill a blog post keeps me logging in at all. Conversely, while I probably don't have any more played hours in Monsters&Memories than in Stars Reach, whenever the opportunity arises to take another look at M&M, I find myself getting almost excited at the prospect.

Not that I've been taking huge advantage of the longer tests in either game. I couldn't manage even a full hour in Stars Reach the other day and I didn't time it but I think my Monsters&Memories session yesterday evening came up a little shy of two hours.I really enjoyed it, though, and I hope to get one or two more sessions in before the servers close down on Sunday. 

It definitely helped that after I'd downloaded the latest launcher and patched up the game to the current version, my character from last time was still there, waiting for me. As I was saying in the feedback I sent to Playable Worlds, even during a testing phase, some sort of continuity is vital to keep players engaged. Well, to keep me engaged, anyway.

Not that it would have made any material difference if I'd had to re-roll and start from scratch. My character from last time hadn't even finished Level One. All she'd done was wander around the overwhelmingly huge city, getting constantly and repeatedly lost, trying to find the two or three NPCs needed for the one or two quests she had, before taking equally long to find the city gates so she could go out into the newbie yard and get killed almost immediately by a large beetle.

That, with only a few small variations, describes all my experiences with Monsters&Memories in every test so far. I make a character or pick up where I left off with the last one. I jog endlessly through the streets, up the countless steps and stairways, in and out of the innumerable buildings. round and round and round, sometimes with no goal in mind at all, sometimes hoping I might somehow stumble across some specific named NPC. 

It's usually dark. There's never any kind of map. Even in the city there are things that want to kill you. Outside the gates, on the sands, if you ever find out how to get there, nothing awaits you but darkness and death.

And yet it's somehow quite compulsive. Partly, the game just looks so good. I've seen reviews that say otherwise and it's certainly a low-detail, low-texture environment but the highly stylized design is effective and the lighting is really excellent. Every time I find myself taking lots of screenshots, few of which do the visuals I'm seeing in the game justice. Atmospheric lighting effects are notoriously hard to capture in stills.

At Level  One, gameplay is literally identical to EverQuest circa the turn of the millennium, which is hardly surprising. As I say every time I write about M&M, it basically is Classic EverQuest. 

This time, though, I managed to get further with the questing than ever before and it occurred to me that the exact period it's re-creating has to be a little past "Classic". I'd peg it around the time low-level armor and weapon quests were added, a process that began in 2002. Before that you wore cloth drops from orc pawns and liked it.

The extent to which the whole things feels just like playing EQ back then is astonishing. The mobs are the same. The spells have the same names. Some even have the same visual effects. 

You have to collect your quest drops in a six-slot bag and "combine" them into a new, separate "bag" that's actually a quest item. Then you hand it in by picking it up on your mouse pointer and dropping it onto the receiving NPC.It doesn't get much more old school than that.

Whether anyone under 35 would ever want to do any of it seems both highly unlikely and also quite beside the point. This is an old game for old people. 

Or is it? I read something quite interesting during Blaugust, where someone was saying the decades-long fetish for ever-better graphics is now washing up against the rocks of a generation raised on the likes of Minecraft and Roblox, games where everything looks like its made out of a load of brightly-colored blocks and no-one cares. Not to mention Old School Runescape.

And what do I know about the quest methodologies in those games, assuming they even exist there? Maybe combining a bunch of scorched skeleton bones in a burlap sack by pressing a big button marked COMBINE feels perfectly normal to people under 20 now. 

I'd bet the rate of progress doesn't though. Boy, is it ever slow! 

Or is it? These assumptions need to be challenged!

It took a while but it did finally occur to me last night that maybe I might be leveling up faster if I spent more of my time actually killing things and less of it running around the city. In EverQuest in 2002 we didn't generally expect to get our XP from quests. We just ran out the city gates ten seconds after we were created and got straight down to killing rats, like any normal person would.

 I find these days - and indeed these last couple of decades - that just the existence of a linear questline is enough to make me forget everything I once knew. In game after game I step on that escalator the moment I see it and do my best to ride it to the top, all the while complaining about how on rails the whole experience has become. 

When I find myself in a game that doesn't bully, bribe or cajole me into questing for a living, which neither Monsters&Memories nor Stars Reach does, rather than congratulating the developers on their thoughtfulness and consideration in treating me with respect, as someone capable of setting my own goals and finding my own fun, what do I do? Complain the game is aimless or purposeless or not even a game at all and start bleating on about how there's no narrative structure, like some caricature of an actor asking "...but what's my motivation?"

Just fricking get out there, kill stuff and watch your numbers go up! What more motivation do you need? I tried a bit of that yesterday and it got me to Level Two. Well, that and the quest hand-in...

I don't know. It's been a long time, hasn't it? Is this what we want any more? Is it what I want?

I guess when Monsters&Memories goes live I'm going to find out. Pantheon didn't do it for me so this is probably the last hurrah of the Golden Age horde. 

It's looking promising so far.

Rule Of Three - or - Measure Once, Cut Thrice

 

The Stars Reach Kickstarter kicks off for real next week. I know this because I'm being deluged with emails from Playable Worlds about it. 

It's not the fault of PW's marketing department. It's a problem all of my own making. It goes back to the multiple times I signed up for the pre-alpha and/or followed the Kickstarter.

That makes it sound as if I was trying to leverage access to the testing program or something shady along those lines but it's the exact opposite. I was just trying to make sure I had one application that met all the criteria. I would love to have just one email account linked to the whole project so I'd get just one email every time. It would strip away at least one layer of confusion in what I've found to be quite a confusing process altogether.

At this stage, I'm not even clear myself how I came to be signed up for testing three times, if I even am. I'm not even sure about that. I have multiple email addresses that forward all their mail to a master address and every time the PW marketing department sneezes, all three of my addresses say "Bless You!". 

Or I thought that was what was happening. Until I took a close look at the send/receive details today.

I certainly am getting those three identical emails every time. I'd been assuming they were going to three different addresses, all of which I presumably gave PW at some point in the process. When I examine them closely, though, it's not as plain as all that what's going on.

Two of the emails are coming directly to my main email address but one has a note appended by googlemail that reads "Yes, this is you."Apparently this is something Google adds if the email used by the sender has some punctuation or variation added that doesn't materially alter the address, like extra dots.  I can't see anything like that in the address that's been used, though. It looks identical.

What  the implications of that might be I have no idea but even if I am only signed up twice as myself it doesn't help much because the testing program requires a Steam account and my Steam account isn't liniked to that email. When I joined Steam I specifically didn't want people to be able to find "Bhagpuss" there, so I am not "Bhagpuss" on Steam and never have been.

Awkwardly, though, I am Bhagpuss on Discord and a Discord account is also required for the testing program. When I was first filling out all the forms, I made a new Discord account under my Steam identity for consistency. Which would have been fine had I not then gotten an invite as myself under the Creators program...

All of that then repeated itself when I needed to "Follow" the Kickstarter launch page . At this stage, about all I can really say is that I am in the testing program as someone but even I'm not sure who I am there.

That is all going to change soon, I think, as Stars Reach transitions from pre-alpha to alpha. Or maybe not. Honestly, I'm not at all clear on what's going on. The emails I'm getting at the moment aren't clarifying anything because either they're still too wooly or I am. It's probably me. 

I got one that made me uncertain whether I was still in the test or not but then I got another with some dates so it seems I am. It didn't help that I also got additional invites off the back of Following the Kickstarter, one of which I foolishly accepted. I was really very muddled about what I was doing at that point. 

I still am but I'm hoping all will be magically revealed when the Kickstarter opens and we get to see the pledges and rewards. 

We're very close now. This morning I woke up to another clutch of emails that had some actual detail on the Kickstarter offers. It's vague but it's something and I'll share it with you now.

There are going to be four tiers, called Citizen, Scout, Reacher and Titan. I could paste the whole lot in but I'll just summarize for brevity. And make comments as I go, of course.

Citizen: Introductory level to let everyone feel involved. Rewards along the lines of titles and wallpapers. Out-of-game stuff or very minor cosmetics, basically. Does not get you into testing.

Scout: For people who want to play. Rewards of some practical, in-game use, such as emotes, outfits and starter gear. Does get you into testing.

Reacher: Tempted to call this the first pay-to-win Tier although that's probably unfair. Most Kickstarters offer stuff like this. You get better tools, "special pets" and a Grav Mesh so you can start flying from the moment you log in. You also get four passes to invite other players to join you (Which you can also trade to other players if you prefer.). It's unclear to me what you'll be inviting them to join you in, though. The testing phase? The live game? Obviously, this tier also gets you into the test program.

Titan: aka "Whale": the usual stuff every mmorpg kickstarter puts in to try to hook a big one. Party with the devs, get your own planet (Phrased somewhat incomprehensibly as "direction on your very own planet", which could mean anything from advice on how to set it up to co-ordinates on where to find it.). There's even the bait of a "1:1 with Raph Koster himself", which could sound more like a threat than a reward.

As is standard with these things, each tier gets you all the stuff in the tiers below.

It's still very loose although it does appear to answer the question of whether pledges will include anything as concrete as a copy of the game or subscription time. And that answer would be "No."

I don't have much else to say about any of it at this point, other than that I think "Reacher" is a really bad name for a tier, since it so strongly implies failure. Someone who's reaching is generally considered to be out of their depth or even trying to be more than they are. If I was till wearing my marketing hat from long ago, I'd have thrown that one out at the spitballing stage. 

If they really wanted to link the tier with the name of the game - not a bad idea - why not go with "Star"? Citizen, Scout, Star, Titan. Doesn't that sound better?

The main things that remain to be revealed, apart from the granular detail of the specific pledges within each tier, are the grand total the Kickstarter is looking to raise and the price points of the pledges. 

I'm going to guess the Citizen tier will be the traditional $5-$10 dollar "Thanks for your support, here's a badge". Never really sure why anyone bothers with those.

The interesting one to me is Scout. I plan on backing the project but I'm not looking to invest in it. A buy-in around $20-$30 would suit me. If it goes to $50 I might opt out. I'd pay that sort of money if it equated to a pre-order with a box price thrown in but nothing like that seems to be on the table. I don't think we even know what the payment model for the live game is going to be yet.

Then there's the question of access to the test program. Here, once again, I find myself both conflicted and confused. The paragraph describing what you get for Scout includes this sentence: "...we're going to let as many people in from the pre-Alpha signups as possible, but after the Kickstarter finishes, we're limiting testing to folks that have contributed at the Scout Tier and above." (Their emphasis.)

I think that means they'll clear the testing program completely at the end of the Kickstarter, including everyone who got in by Following the Kickstarter but also anyone who was in the Friends and Family pre-alpha, even before the Kickstarter was announced. The testing program will then begin anew with only people who pledged at Scout or above invited. 

At least, that's how I read it. I'm ambivalent about being in the tests anyway, mostly because I can barely manage to get any time in any of them. In a practical sense, it wouldn't be that big a deal for me if I was dropped because mostly I'm asleep when the tests are on in any case. For example, I got an email this morning with this week's schedule and both tests run from 11pm or midnight to three or four in the morning. I go to bed at 9.30pm these days so that's a non-starter.

If I pledge at Scout, though, I'll stay in the program and hopefully the hours will extend so I can actually get in for long enough to do something. And for all I know I might still be in the testing anyway, as part of the Creator program, even if I don't pledge Scout. It's all so fuzzy still.

I wonder just how much of an incentive access to the alpha is going to be, anyway. If the game really is going to go into Early Access this year, it probably isn't going to make a lot of difference for anyone who's not already pretty much obsessed with the idea, like the individuals and premades planning on carving out a space empire. 

They're going to want to get in as soon as possible so they can learn all the exploits for when the time comes but it would really make more sense for anyone who's only casually interested to sit it out until EA arrives. Unless you really can't wait because you have the patience of a five year-old or you have a genuine desire to see the development process up close (Or a blog that consumes content like a coked-up wolverine), the quasi-persistence of Early Acess would seem like a more attractive prospect. And it's only going to be a few months according to Raph.

Whatever your plans, the indicators are looking favorable, at least. The Kickstarter currently has just over 5,000 followers, which seems like a good number. Plenty of projects fund with far fewer pledges than that. It all depends how much they plan on asking for, I suppose. 

And that's something we'll find out next week. It's going to be interesting to watch. I'd start popping your corn now.

Elteria Endures

Just shy of a year ago, I received an invite to the alpha test of a sandbox mmorpg by the name of Elteria Adventures. I gave it a go and wrote a First Impressions post in which I described the game as being like "Landmark and Free Realms had a baby". I called it a "solid" and "convincing" start.

That was pretty much the last time I mentioned it until this February, when I wrote a catch-up post in which I went back and looked again at all the First Impressions posts I'd ever written to see how well my initial takes held up. Things didn't look all that promising:

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

Turns out I was a tad premature in writing the game off. Yesterday I was browsing through my Steam library when I happened to notice that Elteria had received an update. I took a look at the notes to see what might have changed.

The first thing I saw was a massive Ukrainian flag with "We Stand With Ukraine" emblazoned across it. Beneath that was this statement:

"Greetings from the Elteria Adventures team!

Despite this difficult time, when half of our team is hiding in bombshelters, and another half is doing everything to help, we still decided to fulfill our promise and release this update in time. It contains several months of our work, so we hope you enjoy it.

We will continue working on this project for as long as we can.
No to war."

Elteria is being developed by the eponymous Elteria Team. I'm not sure if they're actually based in Ukraine or not since information about the company on the web seems unusually sparse. The publisher, Heatherglade Publishing, is based in Hungary, which is right next door.

There followed details of an update that would have been impressive in any circumstances, let alone with a war going on.  It includes a companion for your character, a new mechanic that allows you to expand and upgrade your personal island, a major revamp of mob AI, an expansion/progression mechanic for inventory, significant revamps to both combat and building mechanics, a new Adventure Journal and a "massive rework" of the landscape generation systems. 

Oh, and Raspberry Snails that you can catch and eat. Plus all the usual bug fixes you'd expect in an alpha, naturally.

I thought I'd log in and see things for myself. My old character was still there, something you can never take for granted in an alpha, but it seemed like a better idea to roll a new one and start fresh. There was a choice of North American or European servers and for once I decided to go Euro. The 11ms ping might have swayed my decision there.

As soon as I got in, any plans I had to focus on the new stuff disappeared. For one thing, I'd completely forgotten what a brutal game Elteria Adventures can be, right from the start. 

Looking back at my First Impressions piece, I think I rather glossed over the unforgiving nature of the early stages. I did make some comparisons with Valheim, but having recently gone back to that game as well, I'd have to say that Elteria Adventures makes the Viking afterlife look like a toddlers' tea party.

In Valheim, you might get killed by a skeleton once or twice before you get the hang of things. Maybe by a boar, if you're particularly inept. Last night I lost count of the number of times I was sent to my spawn point by both of them. 

As soon as night fell (And night in Elteria is dark.) the skeletons come out to play and the boars, benign and harmless by day, turn feral. I note with some concern that last year I said that once I'd worked out how to equip a staff and fight with it I had few problems staying alive. Either I've gotten worse since then or the game's gotten tougher because having a stick in my hand didn't really help all that much this time around.

In the end I got so ticked off with pigs and animated bonepiles lunging at me out of the darkness I built myself a shelter. It didn't help much but at least it was something to do with the endless stacks of sand and rubies clogging up my bags.

As I wrote last time, the tutorial takes you through the basics up to the point where you have to make a portal to take you from your personal island to the public areas, where most of the resources are. I got so wrapped doing all that, I lost track of time. 

When I finally got my portal done and logged out, Steam told me I'd been playing for two and a half hours. As I've mentioned before, I have a real problem with games where you can build houses and terraform the landscape. It's as close as I ever get to feeling addicted to a game, which is why I'm wary of getting sucked in. 

I logged in to check a couple of things for this post and found I'd played another hour and a half. It's a yellow flag for me but a recommendation for the game. Clearly it has something going for it if it can set a hook like that.

Of the listed changes, the most immediately noticeable was the Personal Sidekick, a floating bot that accompanies you from your first moments. It neatly fixes a problem I noted last time, namely the ridiculous survival genre convention of punching trees and rocks to get started. The Sidekick does that for you with some kind of ray and it also acts as an attack droid if you haven't made yourself a weapon.

Once I had a stick the Sidekick didn't seem to atack any more. It might be nice if it joined in the fight as well. Other than that, I was very happy to have it's company. You can upgrade it, too, although I didn't quite figure out how.

About the only other changes listed in the update that I spotted were the hives from which you can get restorative honey. That was a lifesaver - literally. Until I got my hands on a honeycomb I couldn't find any way of recovering health, which was one of the reasons I kept dying.

It seemed to me the world looked more detailed and visually richer but looking at the old screenshots and the new I'm not sure I could stand that observation up. The forests do look denser but that's about it.

One difference I definitely did spot was a change to the recipe for the portal that gets you off your Personal Island. In the old post I make mention of needing "Deep Gold" and having to spend some considerable time and effort delving the caves for it. This time round I only needed iron, not that that was particularly easy to come by, either.

If I get a moment, I'm going to log my original character in and see if there's anything new for her to do. As the passage I quoted earlier confirms, the main reason I stopped last time was that I ran out of options. Maybe the new Adventure Journal will have some suggestions.

It's very good to see that development on the game is still progressing, especially given the circumstances. I hope everyone at Elteria Team, including Alice, who was kind enough to drop by and leave a comment on the original post, is safe and well. Let's hope for calmer, brighter days ahead, when the team behind Elteria Adventures can put all their efforts into making something we can all enjoy, rather than playing their own real life survival game.

Elteria Adventures: First Impressions (or You Can't Get The Staff)

This morning I got a pleasant surprise. An email from Steam. You're now in the Steam Playtest for Elteria Adventures Alpha! it said. And an explanation. You are receiving this e-mail because you requested access to the Steam Playtest for Elteria Adventures.

Did I? Did I really? I don't remember. It does sound like something I would do, though.

And there it was, waiting for me on Steam. Press the button, wait a minute or two for the download, not very big, not even a couple of gigabytes, and off we go.

A short introductory presentation to explain how a perfectly ordinary world happened to get eaten by a giant slime and regurgitated as an archipelago of voxel-based space islands. Happens every day. On to character creation.

Character creation is odd. You have to be a human but you can have cat ears. There's a surprising range of horns and antlers. You can choose between something like a dozen different heart-shaped tattoos. All of that and yet the only hair color is green.

I'm guessing the tonsorial monoculture is unintentional or at least not permanent. Lots of characters in the intro have different color hair. It is an alpha.  At least it matches my work shirt. (Edit: Called it! They patched in hair color even as I was writing the post! I'm plum, now.)

 

Pick a name and let's get started. We'll learn how to press WASD and Space and then we can punch some rocks and trees.

Let me add an aside here. What is it with the survival/building genre? How hard would it be to start with a hammer? If it's too much to expect us to know how to open our inventory and equip one then just have us log in holding the damn thing. Punching rocks? Who thought of that?

The rock punching phase passes fast. The tutorial ticks along nicely. Soon you're zapping everything with your psychokinetic splitter. That feels so much better. Point it at anything and blast it like a firehose. See all the little bits whizz into your capacious pack.

The next bit reminded me of Valheim. Not the part when it got dark and I got killed by a skeleton although that did happen in both games. No, the bit where I had to make a workbench first and place it in the world before I could make anything else.

At least, that's what the tutorial said I had to do. I didn't notice it said that until I'd used the icon of the workbench in the crafting UI and made whatever it was I was supposed to be making. I only realized when I'd done it and the tutorial prompt didn't move on to the next instruction. It is an alpha.

 

A lesson in bricklaying later and the basics are all but over. Now all I have to do is make a portal and get off this starter island. The things I need to make it are scattered around the island. Resources here are limited it seems. I'd be a fool to stay. A final word from whatever ethereal being is guiding my hand: Night time is dangerous. Watch yourself.

They're not kidding. First I got killed by a boar. Couldn't figure out how to fight back. Tried punching him. That didn't work. Tried zapping him. Neither did that. 

Then I got killed by another boar. Then I got killed by a skeleton. Still couldn't figure out how to fight back. 

The next time I ran away and fell off the island. I forgot we were floating in space.

About then I remembered when I was learning to craft I'd made a staff. Nothing told me to. I just saw I had the recipe and the mats so I made it. Then I forgot about it. I opened my inventory and there it was. I tried to equip it but my paperdoll only had six slots: two for the head, two for the body, two for the feet. No hands.

 

I've been around this block before. A few times. I figured it out. Eventually. When the tutorial told me about the zapper it also told me to put it in the hotbar. That was a clue. I put the staff in hotbar slot three and clicked the same number on the keyboard and voila! Staff in hand!

After that I didn't die all that much. To one really big boar. To a boar and a skelton at the same time. Only then.

I killed several boars and a skeleton and then it got light. I went exploring and found a cave. I went down and carried on exploring underground. I zapped everything that looked different. If zapping didn't work I hit it with my staff. 

I worked out how to make lights. That was really useful. I searched for parts for my portal but since I didn't know what I was looking for I didn't find any. I worked out how to open my journal but it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.

Finally, as I was coming round the island for the second time, I came across my workbench. I'd forgotten about it. I pressed "F" to use it and found a list of recipes quite different to the list I'd been looking at in the UI. Portal was on there. With a list of mats.

Off on my travels again, looking for gold. I already had the underground stone and some of the skeleton bones and boar tusks. I knew how to get more of those but I'd have to wait for night to fall. Nothing dangerous comes out in daylight.

I hadn't seen any gold but the recipe called it "Deep Gold" so I guessed it must be down in the caves. A long way down. And it was. Lots of it in a room with some pillars that couldn't be zapped or struck or punched.

Deep gold takes longer to mine than any other resource. A lot longer. I stood there with my zapper on full blast for what seemed like ten minutes, watching the black cracks spread across the surface, chipping away at the lode. 

I may have overdone it. I only needed five blocks for a portal. I came away with nearly fifty. It's gold, though, You're not going to leave any behind, are you?

When I got back to the surface it was daylight. I had everything I needed except bones and tusks and I'd have to wait for night to get those. I was right in the middle of doing that waiting when the server came down. It is an alpha.

That's all I've seen so far. It's not much but all of it I like. The controls are simple and intuitive, the concepts make sense, the tone is light and the colors are vivid. If the server hadn't booted me I wouldn't be writing this. I'd be playing.

My elevator pitch? "Landmark and Free Realms had a baby". Fill in your own voxel-based and kid-friendly games of choice. For an alpha this looks solid. I'll be more confident about that when I've seen more but it's a convincing start. 

What puzzles me most is how I came to get the invite in the first place. I guess I must have clicked a box to express an interest but I have no memory of doing it and no memory of the game at all beyond the dimmest recollection I might have seen a news item on MassivelyOP about it some time.

I went to look it up before I posted this. I was trying to find out if there was an NDA. There isn't because it's an open alpha.

 "The long-awaited and (literally) game-changing Open Playtest is finally here, for both new and returning players to enjoy!Join the Open Playtest by clicking the [Request Access] button on the game’s Steam Shop page — and you’ll be automatically granted access to the game!"

I'd do that, if I was you. I did, apparently, even if I don't remember doing it. I'm glad I did. It looks like an interesting game.  

You can read a lot more about it on MMORPG.com, which is where I found the most helpful overview of what the game hopes to be when it grows up. The part that probably led me to register my interest in the first place, before I immediately forgot all about it, was this: "Elteria Adventures is a free to play massive online sandbox RPG". That's a hedging-your-bets way of saying mmorpg by using most of the same words but in a different order.

So, a new mmorpg and one with some potential. They seem to be coming from all directions this year. I think it's safe to say the slump is over.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and see if the server's back up. That portal's not going to build itself.

Truth In Advertising

Four years ago to this very day, the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter campaign began. Within twenty-four hours it had fully funded. A month later it came to a highly successful conclusion. Having asked for three-quarters of a million dollars to "expand our scope and give our team flexibility and room to breathe" (they already had "private backing that will allow us to produce a core viable product"), Intrepid Studios pulled in more than $3m from nearly twenty thousand backers.

I was one of them. I paid $40 each for two Settler packages, one for me and one for Mrs Bhagpuss. I know I paid forty dollars because I still have the email with the virtual receipt. 

I must have been the earliest of birds because the historic Kickstarter page shows the actual "Early Bird" Settler pack going for $45. When the first thousand of those were gone, the price went up to $50, whereupon more than two and half thousand people piled on before the shutters came down.

You have to be fast with these things, apparently. You can't afford to hang around. Well, I guess you could. There are always those catch-up promotions some Kickstarted projects run, repeatedly, after the official campaign closes. Just don't rely on getting the same value for money. ("Value for money" does not imply actual value. Although it does imply actual money.)

Both my decision to back the game and my choice of pledge were pragmatic. I don't regret either. Based on the people involved and the game they proposed to make, I knew I'd certainly want to play it when it launched. I also like to play games in mid-to-late beta, when there's a game there to play but things are still in some state of flux, so it made sense to buy in when that was an option.

Kickstarter called it a pledge but in my mind it was a pre-order. For slightly less than the anticipated cost of the full game on release I'd get a copy of the game itself, an extra months' subscription time (two months altogether) and a few in-game perks. It seemed a reasonable deal.

 

Had I been both wildly optimistic about the game and desperate to play it at the earliest possible opportunity, I could have gone for the $500 "Braver of Worlds" package (only $485 if I'd snatched the Early Bird deal). That came with not only a guaranteed invite to Alpha 1 ("Earliest Access to Ashes!") and a ton of in-game exclusives but most importantly a Lifetime Subscription.

Lifetime Subs have acquired something of a mixed reputation over the years. If the stars align they can be very worthwhile. So long as you remain interested in playing a game for long enough and the servers stay up and the company behind it doesn't decide to change the payment model, you could end up saving (or at least not spending) hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

On the other hand, if you lose interest after a few months or it converts to free-to-play or even sunsets after a year or two, you could end up out of pocket and out of sorts, angry with the bastards who ripped you off or, worse, angry with yourself for being such a dingus.

Still, $500 for a lifetime subscription to a game that's presumably going to charge at least a hundred dollars a year for the cheapest membership package isn't crazy. I pay around a hundred dollars a year for my Daybreak All Access sub and I've been doing it for easily a decade and a half. A five hundred dollar lump sum in 2004 would have saved me a small fortune.

Would you still pay that $500 for something like the Braver of Worlds package if it didn't include a lifetime sub, though? That's not a rhetorical question. If you feel you'd like to stump up half a grand to see Ashes of Creation in its earliest publicly-available build, well you can.

The full details of the buy-in are due to be released tomorrow but if you want to hear the basics, Community Marketing Lead Margaret Krohn and head honcho (okay, "Creative Director") Steven Sharif talk about it briefly from around 4.35 in this YouTube edit of the Twitch livestream:

Sharif  goes out of his way to make the point that "this is a true developmental alpha". He doubles down on that, saying "Do not purchase this package if you are looking to play a game. If you are looking to play Ashes of Creation you should not be purchasing an alpha one package". He then goes on to explain, in some detail, the expected role of a volunteer tester. And he's quite strict about it. He actually calls it a "stern warning" and it kind of is.

What's even more surprising is the interruption from Margaret Krohn, who cuts Sharif off at one point to embark on a mini-rant about how people shouldn't even buy the regular cosmetic packages "if you're not sure and you're not interested". She explains at some length that the cosmetic items people are paying for are the same ones already being developed as part of the normal process of making the game and that they'll be used on NPCs all over the world.

"Don't buy the packages!" she says, with some animation, waving her hand in a way that clearly indicates forbiddance. It's strange to watch. At one point Sharif laughs out loud, saying "I know it's weird. You've probably never heard a company tell you not to do this." It's as though he's just realised what he's saying and can hardly believe it himself.

He's right. It is weird. But then, the whole thing's weird, the whole bizarre development and funding process we've all come to expect and accept, however grudgingly, these last few years. Sharif is as clear as he can be that all of this is what companies have to do to raise money to make games. Not the only thing, but one of the significant and important ones.

The MassivelyOP thread is typically conflicted. Some commenters think people should be allowed to spend their money however they like. Some think the whole thing stinks. I dropped in to comment that I can't see what's new about any of it. And I can't. Which isn't to say I'm comfortable with it. I just know I've seen it all before.

I remember back in the eighties sitting in pubs chatting to friends who were thinking of paying significant sums to go on "holiday" to farms where they'd do all the regular chores for a couple of weeks. They'd effectively live the life of a farm laborer and pay the owner of the farm for the privilege. I've also known people sign on to act as crew on sailing yachts in the Mediterranean - not as paid employees but as paying guests... guests who do most of the work.

I've always found this sort of thing a peculiar choice. It wouldn't be mine. Even so, I don't have any trouble seeing why and how these kinds of activities can be something that both sides find acceptable. 

There are plenty of socio-political arguments to be had concerning the implications and effects of such arrangements, how they affect the economic viability of third parties who might otherwise rely on the work now being done by affluent volunteers, how it changes the understanding of the concept of paid labor within society, all that fun stuff. Those, by and large, aren't the arguments I'm seeing on forums when this kind of thing crops up.

Mostly it's a stand off between those who feel they have the right to spend their money how they damn well please and those who have their hackles up because someone's getting scammed. Who, exactly, is getting scammed is never quite clear. Certainly, the people complaining about it aren't. They're the last ones likely to be paying anyone anything.

The big fish in this pond is Star Citizen, of course. My not-so-very considered take on SC is that the pre-game there is the game. People are effectively buying and collecting virtual toys. Whether there's ever a virtual playground to play with them in doesn't really come into it.

In the case of Ashes of Creation, it's pretty plain that no-one's getting conned. When the guy selling you snake oil says "Don't buy this jar of snake oil unless you want some snake oil" you can hardly come back later and complain "Hey! You sold me snake oil!". At this point in development everyone on both sides seems determined to make it all absolutely clear. The terms and conditions are laid out for everyone to see.

It's a pity the same didn't apply to  the original Kickstarter campaign. Or, indeed, any Kickstarter campaign.

My credit card was charged $40 for my pledge in June 2017. My virtual receipt clearly states: "Estimated Delivery: Dec 2018". Soon, maybe tomorrow, for $500 you'll be able to buy in to the first public alpha of the game that was estimated to launch (or at least go into late beta) more than two years ago . Maybe you'll even get an estimated delivery date. I wouldn't book any time off work.

I still don't regret backing Ashes of Creation. I'm still interested in playing it, just not as interested as I was four years ago when I thought I'd be playing it in a year and half. Not that I really thought that. I know how long AAA mmorpgs take to build and it's not any eighteen months.

What I don't get is why developers can't just say that. If my pledge had come with an Estimated Delivery of December 2021 or even December 2022, I'd still have signed up. I can wait. I can deal with deferred gratification. I'm not a child.

So why treat me like one?

Time Capsule

 

FHX:Restoration is an emulator project that's hoping to bring back not one, not two, but three supposedly extinct mmorpgs: Ferentus, Herrcot and Xiones. Those were names of the localized versions of a game that originated in Korea in 2004, then spreading first to North America and later to Germany before finally looping back around to Korea once again.

If you're interested in the convoluted history of the game, and it's an intriguing story, there's a timeline with plenty of explanatory detail in this video:

I first played the game, as Ferentus, in one of its North American beta releases, probably some time around 2006. I remember it as being quite rough and unfinished but it had some indefinable... something, because even though I probably spent no more than a handful of hours there, I never forgot it.

Now I've had the chance to compare my no doubt rose-tinted recollections with the grim reality and... it's even better than I remembered! I've only managed to drag myself away because I know this is a very short (three day) test and there's really no point spending hours and hours on a character I may never see again (although characters are being saved between tests so maybe there is a point after all).

What's so good about an ancient game that's already failed, several times, to hold an audience? That's not so hard to explain.

First off, it's a dikuMUD inspired mmorpg. Kind of. It's not a purebred clone but it's close enough. You can make a character, jog out of the city gates and start killing wolves and things pretty much tick along from there. That already puts it ahead of the pack for me.

Because of its history, though, it straddles two major development phases of the genre. It looks and plays something like a prettier EverQuest but it has some of the user-friendly features of EQ's vastly more popular successor, World of Warcraft. NPCs have punctuation marks over their heads, there's a functional quest journal, melee classes can solo...

Well, I say they can solo. Of course, I have literally no idea what the game is like beyond the starting levels. It might turn into a hardcore nightmare for all I know. I don't remember exactly how far I got back in 2006 but I doubt I made it into double figures.

Leveling in almost all mmorpgs back then was a lot slower than you'd expect to find in almost any game nowadays. Even the first few levels would typically take a few hours, not a few minutes and once you hit double figures you'd expect things to slow down considerably. 

This morning in FHX I got to level five in a couple of hours, but I was lucky. Well, eventually. Things got off to a bit of a false start, when I broke my longstanding rule of always making either a fighter or a pet class when starting out in a new mmorpg.

I don't know why. I did that. Okay, yes I do. As you'd expect in a game of its age and type, classes in FHX are locked to specific races. And there are only three races. And they're all ones I don't like. I mean, come on, Barbarian, High Elf or Wood Elf? That's a choice?

I looked at the class/race combos and I nearly went with a Wood Elf archer. If I have to play an elf then a wood elf ranger is one of the least offensive options. But I had a vague memory of playing one of those the first time round and of it not going well. 

So I looked at what else wood elves could do and apparently they can be wizards. I rarely play wizards and wood elves are almost never given the opportunity to put on the pointy hat. It sounded like it might be fun.

 

Yeah, well, it wasn't, really. It wasn't terrible but despite the question marks hanging over questgivers heads, FHX isn't WoW. If you chain-cast fireballs at level one you run out of mana. Often before the thing you're throwing them at is dead.

It took me a while to get the spells set up and find out I had to spend points to upgrade them. Progression is kind of hybrid between levels and skill based, which I'd have realized if I'd read the very extensive and detailed in-game help guide that opens automatically when you log in, only I'd closed that before I got out of the city because I was impatient to start setting the wildlife on fire.

I pushed on with the wizard for a while. She got to level two but she was struggling to handle even cons. She died a couple of times and because I'd selected "windowed" in the options, the bottom few millimeters of the screen were inaccessible, including the chat line. I wasn't planning on chatting but I needed to be able to enter text I could type in /revive, which is what you have to do to recover from a death, if you don't happen to have a cleric with you or a resurrection scroll in your bag.

After going to character select a few times after a death, just so I could log back in and wake up in the town square, it occured to me that maybe, since I was there anyway, I might as well make a new character. I decided to suck it up and make a Barbarian warrior on the grounds that at least that way I wouldn't run out of mana.

I've never liked barbarians. First of, who wants to be a barbarian? Is that an aspiration? I don't think so. It's more of an insult, isn't it? Secondly, who wants to look like a barbarian? Build like a carnival strongman, decked out in rancid furs, hollowed-out skull for a hat? And don't even get me started on the kilts...

Only FHX barbarians aren't exactly like that. I made a female barbarian and she looked... kinda cool. Athletic build, funky boots, clean, shiny hair, cute vest, shorts... she looked more like a sports instructor at summer camp than a barbarian.

The good first impression translated into an even better second one. I picked up a couple of quests the wizard hadn't managed to finish and took the barbarian out to kill some wolves and spiders. She tore through them with barely any downtime. Even the lack of any form of self-healing didn't slow her down. (I'd gone with Knight as a class - I guess I could have picked Paladin for the heals but paladin is the elf of classes...).

By the time she dinged level three her bags were full. Inventory in FHX uses the grid/size method. Each item takes up a certain amount of space and you can carry as much as you can fit into the squares. Which isn't a lot. 

I'd already found the bank when I was playing the wizard so I went back there to stash the loot I didn't want to sell. To my surprise it appears bank storage is by account, not character. All the wizard's stuff was in there. That's a mixed blessing. It's very convenient but it also mitigates against bank muling later on. 

As I was banking something very old school happened. I got drive-by buffs. Really good ones. The kind a high-level gives you that last ages and turn you into a kind of entry-level god. It's such a familiar experience from the golden age of mmorpgs and something that almost never happens in modern ones. Can't happen, usually, because the capacity for doing it has been designed out altogether.

When you get buffs like that you don't waste them. I thanked the buffer and legged it out of the city gates in search of something significantly higher level than me to bully. Over a hill I came across some level five wolves and past them a camp of level six bandits. The buffs lasted around an hour and I spent most of it grinding.

It was glorious. Because I was in absolutely no danger (my hit points had jumped from around five hundred to two and a half thousand, my armor class had gone up accordingly and I was regenning so fast the rare hits I did take didn't even make a blip on my health bar) I had time to admire the combat animations and visual effects. 

 

They're really excellent. Simple but elegant. I think it shows in the screenshots, most of which look almost posed. The accompanying sounds work equally well, all of which makes grinding mobs an aesthetically satisfying proposition. It feels smooth. Really smooth.

As for the mobs, they all dropped useable loot - armor, weapons, crafting patterns - which is exactly how I like it. Well, I have a minor issue with wolves and spiders dropping boots and tunics but that ship sailed decades ago. 

The main problems were lack of inventory space (what could be more traditional?) and the peculiar design choice of making almost everything that dropped require level five to use/equip, even when it came off a level one mob. All that did was make me more determined than ever to ding five, though, so maybe someone knew what they were doing after all.

Even with the buffs progress wasn't fast by modern standards. Of course, the one classic power-levelling buff I was missing was a damage shield. Get one of those and all you have to do is collect as many mobs as you can find and wait for them to beat themselves to death on your spikes. My barbarian had to do it the hard way and her sword didn't hit much harder even with the strength buff she'd received.

In the end the timing worked out just right. The last of the buffs were wearing off just as she dinged five. Then it was back to the bank to sort through the loot and get dressed. No more short shorts and bare midriff: on with the leggings and tunic. It did make her look considerably more like a barbarian, albeit one with access to a loom.

And that was where I left it. I had a great time. If this was an open beta or a launch I'd be adding FHX to my "currently playing" list. If I had one. Which I don't. But the principle stands. As it is, I'm putting it on my "watch with interest and play when possible" list. I do in fact have one of those. 

I'm not sure at what stage of development the FHX Restoration team consider the game to be at right now, but in the starter levels it feels pretty solid. I had a few disconnects from the server and there was that one issue with the incorrect resizing of the windowed display option but other than that everything played perfectly.

It's interesting to compare FHX to Reign of Darkness, which I posted about the other day. They have a very similar aesthetic. I enjoyed both dipping a toe in both of them. FHX, though, still has that mysterious something about it that's kept it in the back of my mind all these years. It's a feels thing: hard to pin down but you know it when you... well, when you feel it.

I look forward to seeing where things go from here for FHX. I have the website bookmarked and the game installed and I look forward to the next test, when, with luck, I'll have more time to play. It'd be nice to see what's out there, beyond the woods and fields that ring the city walls.

Darkness, Darkness...

Sometime around the middle of Sunday afternoon I happened across this news item at Massively OP. I was mildly interested. I had a vague memory of having heard the name Reign of Darkness before, although I didn't immediately associate it with an mmorpg. Maybe I was thinking of that project Funcom canned when they were having money troubles. Or was it CCP? Some northern European developer, anyway. 

"Old school hardcore" isn't a phrase that sets my juices flowing these days, either. It might have, a few years back. There was a moment when taking a trip back to the imagined golden age seemed like a fine idea but I'm guessing most people are over that, now. And anyone who's not is probably playing Classic WoW.

Still. Tab-target and all. It seemed negligent not to at least take a look and there was no time to waste. Doors close on the free weekend at 10am PST on December 1st. Which means you still have a day to check it out for yourself, providing you're reading this right after I hit publish.

Reign of Darkness is conveniently available on Steam and I do mean conveniently. Steam hasn't generally been thought of as a primary platfrom for mmorpgs but if there's one time when it comes into its own it's for demos and tests like this. It makes a big difference, not having to come up with yet another throwaway email address to make yet another account with yet another company for yet another game that I'll only ever use this once.

Instead it was a flurry of quick clicks and a fast download and there I was, staring at my new character moodily staring back at me from beneath her pointy hood. Nice armor, too.

There was a large Kickstarter logo to the upper right and a succinct and coherent mission statement to the left. I didn't stop to check the Kickstarter page at the time. I was eager to jump into the game, get a few screenshots and call it a day. I figured I'd get a blog post out of it and not much more. 

I'm going to de-rail that story by saying right now that I ended up playing for a couple of hours. It was fun. Also, I have since visited the Kickstarter page and it's a good one. 

The goals are realistc. The developers (it's really pretty much one guy, Tyler Smith) already have a working game. They just want to ensure that development is able to continue. The sum they're trying to raise, $100,000, seems realistic but for once, very unusually, they've itemized exactly how that money will be spent.

At least, I think that's what the wheel is meant to show. There's no explanatory gloss. It's fascinating to see the lion's share of money to be raised is predicated for taxes and legal costs. I'd be curious to hear some more on how that works. Also, why the total comes to $123,000 rather than round hundred the campaign asks for.

Overall, though, it comes across as one of the more balanced, rational and convincing Kickstarter pitches I've seen. The goals are clear and coherent, there's a working product backers can try out and the stretch goals do in fact stretch the concept rather than break it.

Not that I imagine the stretch goals are going to come into contention. The campaign has only just begun (it runs until December 27th) and so far it's at $1,656, which is 1.66% funded. The way these things go, if they're going to succeed there's usually a big burst at the start and then again towards the end. RoD's going to need to pick up some traction if it's going to make its goal.

I'm thinking about pledging, albeit only at the level that gets me a copy of the game and a title. At $20 that's really not much of a commitment. It's the same price as the Early Access version already available on Steam. I might just buy that instead.

The reason I'm considering it is simple. Reign of Darkness already has the makings of a decent mmorpg. I played for a couple of hours yesterday and didn't really want to stop. It's barebones, yes, but the bones are sound. It just needs flesh putting on them.

The developers are a little vague about their credentials ("Together our team has worked on many projects and has over 30 years of experience.  Working on apps, online & offline games, company-specific tools, and many other creations.") but they mention having worked on the Vanguard Emulator project. That doesn't surprise me. There are some distinct similarities between RoD and Vanguard.

There are a lot more differences, though. There are all the usual high fantasy trappings ("Medusa, Minotaurs, Lycans, Vampires, Sirens, Chimeras, and vile serpents, Dragons") and the classes are familiar (Necromancer, Paladin, Priest, Archer, Barbarian...) but the choice of background and setting is odd. It's set in an alternate version of the Middle Ages when "Through his own actions mankind created the bane of his own existence, he had created Satan".

 

There's a lot of that going on, I find. I'll add this one to my growing pile of horror-inflected fantasy I.P.s. I have a post brewing about that but it's almost too big a topic to get a handle on right now. Suffice it to say that, for me at least, dragging Christian iconography into the fantasy mix is not a strong selling point.

I'd rarely let the supposed lore put me off playing an mmorpg with solid diku-MUD gameplay, though, and based on my brief experience with it so far I'd definitely say Reign of Darkness has that. Once I'd made my character, which didn't take long since there are currently no choices beyond whether you want to be male or female and what you want to call yourself, it was off to kill small animals and level up.

Yeah, not exactly. I did get to that but it took just a little longer. First I watched the optional introduction in which a mysterious figure, apparently suffering from a severe depressive illness, made a long speech in a barely-audible whisper. The figure kept its back to me the whole time. Once it stood up. Then it sat down again. Meanwhile an ominous, giant figure moved across the horizon. If it was meant to be unsettling it succeeded.

Once that was done I logged into the game itself and found myself in a small castle. There were quite a few people wandering around, most of them players. At this point I'd usually spend a good while fiddling with the UI and the settings but RoD doesn't have many options yet and the defaults are very close to what I'd choose so I just checked I had a weapon equipped and set off to start hacking up the local wildlife.

The scenery was pleasant enough. The game's made in Unity and looks immediately familiar because of that, I think. I found a guard who wanted some scorpions killed, which sounded about my speed, although I thought he was pushing his luck asking for fifteen. Hasn't he ever heard of the Kill Ten convention?

Scorpions were easy enough to find. They were all over the place and the size of carts. Unfortunately the first three or four I tried were inert. I could hit them but they didn't bite back. I would have been fine with that but they also took no damage so I moved on.

 

That was the only glitch or bug I experienced in the couple of hours I played and it only happened in one spot. I soon found a scorpion that didn't stand still for being poked with a sword. It killed me and fast. I woke up in the castle and tried again with the same result.

There's old-school and there's hardcore and there's "you're doing it wrong". Which I was. Over the course of the next half-hour I managed to find out several things about how to set up a character in Reign of Darkness, among them how to choose a class (you can have up to three, mix-and-match), how to spend points on statistics (you start with forty, all unallocated), how to select spells, attacks and passives and how to move your abilities onto your hotbars so you can actually use them.

Some of this stuff I'd normally expect to have found in Character creation and the rest of it in a tutorial. Here you just have to pick it up as you play. 

Once I'd gotten all that lot sorted I had a much better time of it. I found some more quests (the game's not too old-school to hang a punctuation mark over an NPC's head) although I had to remember them for myself since I couldn't find a quest journal. I put my bow away because arrows are in limited supply and took to relying on my trusty starter sword.

As I wandered the roads around the castle, laying steel to anything that came in reach, my bags began to fill up with what looked like crafting materials and cash drops. With a couple of necromantic spells and a leech attack worthy of any dark knight I was winning most of my fights, even with creatures a level or two above me, but there were plenty of times when it was close and a few when I got in over my head and woke up back in the castle courtyard.

At one point I ventured through a portal at the base of a tower only to find myself in an arena of some kind. I came back out pretty quickly but not long after I managed to get into a competition with some passing stranger over who should be killing a scorpion and it turned out I'd tripped my PvP flag because the stranger left off killing the scorpion and killed me instead.

It was all quite jolly. I was having a pretty good time. It got even better when I searched the corpse of something I'd killed and found a blue-quality sword. Nothing like a good drop to raise the spirits. When I received an off-hand weapon and found I coud dual-wield I was really starting to get into it.

By the time I made level five it was plain Reign of Darkness was successfully pressing most of the right buttons for me. It's clearly in the very early stages and I'm not sure how much content it already has (although someone in chat mentioned hitting level thirty-two and I saw someone riding what appeared to be a wyvern mount, so there would seem to be some depth to the game already). The potential is evident, though.

Although it's coming from a somewhat different branch of the mmorpg evolutionary tree, perhaps the game RoD most reminds me of is Project:Gorgon. It has the same handmade feel to it, a similar sense of being one person's vision. There's the same impression of care and attention, that this is something someone's making because it's the game they want to play themselves.

That's not going to help RoD break any sales records but it's a good sign for longevity. Games like these tend to grow slowly but stick around. I'd be surprised if the Kickstarter succeeeds (although I hope it does) but, like Project:Gorgon, I don't imagine failure to fund will put an end to it. When P:G failed, Eric and Sandra Heimburg just kept plodding along and I imagine Tyler Smith will, too.

Like P:G, I can imagine RoD picking up a small but loyal following, particularly if development on Pantheon continues at the current, glacial pace. There's very definitely a market here that's not being well served and anything functional is going to draw at least a small crowd.

Reign of Darkness is already better than just functional. It's fun, if you like that sort of thing, which I do. I don't imagine I'll end up spending a lot of time there, not least because I find the premise and the lore more than a tad disturbing, but I can definitely see it becoming one of those games I pop into now and again to see how it's coming along and then find myself playing for longer than I intended.

That alone makes it worth either backing or just buying on Steam. The question is, when am I going to find the time to play?