Last First Impressions Of Crystal Of Atlan

When I posted my first impressions of Crystal of Atlan back at the end of May, I certainly didn't think I'd still be posting about it a month later. Let's face it, my record for sticking with new games is abysmal these days. It never was great but at least I used to manage a month or two before running off after the next new fad. 

This year, with my gaming time at what has to be an all-time low since I first started playing PC games somewhere around 1997 or1998, any new game I take a look at can consider itself lucky if I come back for a second session. If I was interested in self-flagellation, I could go back through this year's posts and tally up all the games I've posted about once or twice and never again. It'd be a lot.

Let's not run away with the idea that I've played a lot of Crystal of Atlan, though. This will be the fifth post I've written about the game and that won't be too far off the number of sessions I've played. I haven't been counting but I'd guess it's no more than seven or eight. Still, that's a lot more than I was expecting, when I downloaded the game on a whim.

Given that there are very many better games I could be playing, plenty of them as new and some of them already sitting on my hard drives, why is COA the one that keeps getting the nod? It's a more-than-decent anime-styled action RPG that looks good and tells a good story but there are literally dozens of those. Why this one?

I wish I knew. It's not just "because it's there". As I said, I have plenty of games already installed, just waiting for me to choose them, some even in the exact same genre. And yet somehow, when the mood comes over me to play a video game, something that happens less and less often as the sun keeps on shining and being outdoors seems like a much better plan than sitting in front of a screen, it's Crystal of Atlan that gets the nod.

There's the dopamine hit, of course. My one and only character dinged 42 yesterday. That's quite fast progress and it comes in spurts, often at the end of a dungeon, when all the accumulated xp is dumped on her at once and she jumps a level or two at a stroke. That feels good.

The game also employs my favorite method of gear upgrades, drops from mobs. That's not the only way they come but it's how I've been getting most of mine and it's a significant attraction and another dopamine hit. Why developers ever moved away from gear drops to points systems and quest rewards beats me.

Then there's the look and feel of the thing. In recent years there's been a torrent of very good-looking games, to the point where I feel the baseline for "acceptable" is now somewhere above what would have classed as "outstanding" just a few years ago. COA doesn't stand out as particularly impressive by those standards but it certainly meets them and more by dint of its unfussiness and concentration on making a big, splashy impression.

Where other games of its kind offer a mutiitude of small details to create their worlds, this one sticks with the big picture. Everything is oversized and most of it seems to be built out of slabs. The place feels solid. There's also no shortage of neon and stained glass and everything is brightly colored, often in single tones. It's not subtle but it works.

The game describes the setting as "Magitech" and the style as "anime" but for my money the overarching aesthetic is "children's picture-book". It has that illustrative look to it, designed to appeal to an audience not quite old enough to read all the words yet. I'm not saying COA is a children's game, though. Far from it. It's probably just as well if the little ones can't read the words here, given what those words are saying.

I'm not about to say Crystal of Atlan has a great plot or that the writing is inspired. It definitely doesn't and it certainly is not.  It is often charming, though, and quite often amusing. Most importantly, it's a pleasure to read. Mostly it will be reading, too. There's some voice acting but not that much.

There are also plenty of cut scenes but they're much shorter than in some games I could mention and seem to concentrate mostly on scene-setting and local color. One thing I found interesting was that when I looked at the screenshots I'd taken of a couple of cut scenes, I noticed there was a lot more going on than I'd realised as they played out in front of me. Whether that says more about the game or me is another question. 

The plot as far as I've followed it mostly revolves around drug dealing, corruption and child exploitation, which it has to be said is an unusual approach for a game of this nature. Of course, the drug in question is a magitech performance enhancer with side effects that turn people into monsters and the children are Dickensian street urchins with amazing thieving and combat skills, but still...

Speaking of combat, it's good fun so far. I read an opinion piece over at MMOBomb earlier, where the writer, Mathew D'Onofrio, tried his first gacha action RPG and was impressed with the look of the thing but much less so with the combat. "Looks Good, Plays Bad" was his tl;dr.

That game was yet another new anime-gacha-action RPG I'd never heard of: Mongil: Star Drive. You can't throw a stone without hitting one of the damn things nowadays. 

What he didn't like about the combat was that there wasn't enough to do: "all I was doing was left-clicking, occasionally dodging with the right mouse button, and spamming Q and E for skills and ultimates." He followed that up with another complaint: "It felt like I was brute-forcing my way through every fight."

I quoted that in full because it does a fair job of summing up what I like about combat in Crystal of Atlan. The less I have to do, the better I like it. That said, there's actually quite a bit more to COA's combat than Mathew found in M:SD. I can't quite remember what it is but I know I was hitting more than just two buttons. (1,2,3,4, for skills, 5 for the pet, R for potions, Q and E for specials/ultimates, shift for dodge...)

Whatever it is, it's manageable for the moment. No doubt it will spiral over my skill ceiling at some point but so far it's comfortably below it and I'm enjoying the fights. Just as well because it is pretty much a fighting game, with an inverse ratio of combat to dialog as Wuthering Waves. 

Perhaps the biggest draw so far is the set pieces. Some of those are very impressive. Last session, I had one of those classic fights on top of a moving train. It was visually thrilling, as I would have loved to have taken some screenshots to demonstrate, but it was take photos or don't fall off and I chose to keep my footing.

The current series of dungeons I'm enjoying give a nod to Alice in Wonderland but really seem more like a fairground. It's a big upgrade, visually, from the sewers and back alleys of the previous chapter. It's nicer to be fighting in a clocktower filled with stained glass windows or next to a whirling carousel with prancing painted horses rather than a tunnel filled with sludge, that's for sure.

There's a whole exploration side to the game that I haven't yet... erm... explored, where you can search for collectible cards and take photos in scenic areas. I'm a lot more likely to do that when there are attractive views all around. 

The animations are striking, too. I used not to be much of a one for animations but play enough action RPGs and you start to get a taste for them. I very much enjoy the way my character does leaps and flips and I spend as much time doing it as I can when there's a fight going on. Whether it helps I'm not sure but it feels good and if I could get a screenshot I bet it'd look good, too.

The thing I'm most displeased with is what my character's wearing. It's still that embarassing maid's outfit. I really need to look into how to get something less humiliating. Of course, I could always spend some money and buy an outfit in the cash shop. That'd be a first!

As that last paragraph suggests, I think I'm rapidly approaching the point where I'll need to do some proper research on how the game works, what there is to do and how to get the best out of it all. Otherwise I fear I'll just be funnelled down the main storyline into dungeon after dungeon, which will most likely cease to be fun as soon as the fights start to be in any way challenging.

At Level 42 I really ought to be past the First Impressions stage anyway, so I think this is going to be the final post in that line. Next time - if there is a next time - I might have to start talking about the game as a game, not just a novelty. 

If I ever get that far, I'd call it a win for Crystal of Atlan. 

Let's Go Round Again

Kaylriene has a long post up about rotations and one-button mode in World of Warcraft and reading it made me think about the whole twisty topic in something of a different way. I'm not sure if I have enough to say about it myself to warrant a whole post but let's see how it goes.

I used to get quite irritated at the very mention of "rotations". At first it just wasn't a term I was familiar with from MMORPGs I'd played so I was suspicious of it on a purely linguistic level. What did it mean? Was it jargon from one or two specific games, bleeding across and staining the others? Why did people keep throwing it into conversations as though everyone obviously knew exactly what it meant?

I didn't know what it meant, not from personal experience, but it became clear enough from context quite quckly; it seemed to mean the order you cast spells or used abilities in combat. Or, if you prefer, the order you pressed the buttons to make it happen. Same thing.

This seemed weird to me from the get-go. Why would you have any sort of set order for something like that? Surely it would always be dependent on too many outside factors, like where you were, what you were fighting, who you were with and so on? I found it hard to imagine many situations where it would be advisable, let alone necessary, to stick to a pre-defined set of spells or abilities rather than assessing the situation in real time and choosing accordingly, which was how I'd always played.

By the time I'd seen the term "rotation" often enough to take notice of it, I guess I'd been playing MMORPGs for maybe a decade and a half. I'd been through my grouping years and come out the other side. Even though I was pretty much a solo player by then, I had done a lot of group play in my time and anyway it seemed the "rotation" concept applied to solo play, too, although obviously there it was deemed less crucial since if you were doing it wrong, no-one was going to suffer except you.

And that was even weirder; the idea that you could do it wrong. It was strange enough to me that people thought there were sequences of button presses that ought to be followed to begin with, let alone that you could be ostracized for not getting it right. Then again, I was well aware that MMO players were perfectly capable of refusing to have anything to do with each other over things far more ridiculous than that, such as which race they'd chosen at character creation, based not on RP prejudice but on the tiny variation in starting stats.

Whatever, I thought it was affected and obnoxious to tell other people they were playing the game wrong, even if it was true that the way they were doing it was less effective than it might be. It wasn't that I thought it was a bad idea to give people suggestions on how to hit harder or kill faster. Helpful advice is always welcome, or should be. It was more that I'd always felt that it was other people's business how they played and that if I didn't like the way they were doing it the solution was not to play with them.

Which, now I come to write it down, does sound like saying ghosting someone is better than telling them to get lost. But by and large we rarely did either. What we mostly did, all those years I was grouping with friends, guildmates and passing strangers, was to put up with pretty much anything anyone did that didn't get us all killed. 

There were certain names that used to make Mrs Bhagpuss and I groan out loud when they asked to join a group we were in or who we'd see log in and hope they didn't start asking us what we were doing and if we had space, but when the moment came, we pretty much always invited them anyway and worked around whatever their peculiarities or incompetencies might be. I'm sure other people felt the same about us but we all generally just muddled along and had fun somehow.

One reason I was never really aware of any kind of pressure to perform was that I never went near anything that could be called top-end content. I didn't raid and I was mostly behind or just up to the endgame, which was a lot harder for anyone to get to in those days.

The other significant factor was that in all the time I was grouping as a matter of course, roughly from the turn of the millennium to about 2008, in maybe half a dozen or more games, I never had to deal with damage meters. There were parsers in use, particularly in EverQuest. I ran one myself for a while, when there was a fad for them in the guild I was in. It was fascinating to see who was doing what, but everyone treated them more as something to gossip about than an indication anything ought to change. 

That makes it sound as though we were all little plaster saints and we certainly were an easy-going bunch but also gameplay was very different then. If you were down the bottom of the parse for damage or healing it might mean you were bad at playing your class but it could just as likely mean you'd been doing something else equally important like crowd control or debuffing, both of which were abolutely crucial to success in some MMORPGs of the era.

There were two ways you could be welcome in a group back then; one was being good at your role and the other was being fun to be with. The first is self-explanatory. We'd put up with some fairly irritating personal behavior to have a tank who could hold aggro like the tar-baby and knew how to turn mobs, and a healer who could be relied on not to let anyone die was allowed a great deal of leeway when it came to being grumpy and sarcastic (Holds up hand!) 

I imagine that still holds true today. The second, though, I suspect was an artefact of the time. Group combat back then involved a lot more down-time between fights and there was a lot more conversation both between pulls and during combat itself. People talked non-stop, frankly. It was like being in a chat-room where every so often a mob ran in and we beat it to death for interrupting our conversation.

In that scenario, being funny, amusing, witty, sharp-witted and a good conversationalist was about as likely to get you invited back as coming top of the parse for DPS. More so, in fact, since anyone can poke a sword into a monster from behind but not everyone can time a punchline.

In an environment like that the idea of a specific rotation designed to eke out the last few drops of damage seems like a luxury at best and a fantasy in most situations. While it's true that some groups did develop a rhythm that had them killing mobs like shelling peas, for the most part every pull was at least partly a surprise and every fight was likely to turn into a scramble for survival, with everyone living on their wits and their reactions. 

My persepctive as a Cleric in EverQuest also colored my understanding of what a fight was. I only had access to a limited number of spells and I had to choose them in advance. I had a lot more potentially useful spells than I could load so I had to try and predict which I'd be most likely to need. 

That meant a bunch of heals, of course, but also some cures, buffs and utilities, some of which would end up not being used at all. And there were plenty of times when things happened that I hadn't planned for, leaving me without the tools to do the job I'd suddenly been given. Many times I ended up leafing through my spell-book mid-fight, frantically trying to load a spell I never expected to want.

later, when I was playing a Beastlord, something I did for a couple of expansion cycles, I never even knew for sure what my role would be from fight to fight. As a swiss army knife class, I might be off-tanking, back-up healing, debuffing or adding DPS. Sometimes I'd be doing all of them in the same pull. The idea of a rotation would have seemed laughable.

With all of this in mind, later, when the concept became clear to me, I saw it is as restrictive, unintuitive, unimaginative and fundementally opposed to most of the reasons I'd ever played the games to begin with. Why would I want to limit myself to a set pattern of key-presses just to make a few numbers go up? 

My philosophy had always been the same; any fight that ends with the mob dead and the player alive is de facto a good one. The idea that there might be some kind of gold star on offer for doing it faster seemed nuts. TTK is another term I never heard used in those days.

Not that I was against efficiency. As a sit-and-heal Cleric of the strictest order, I used to rate my own success by how few heals I cast and how much mana I had left. A perfect fight for me would be one in which I sat and medded through the entire thing. With an attitude like that, you can see why the concept of rotation wasn't doing anything for me. 

As I was reading Kaylriene's post, though, something occured to me that I hadn't thought of before, whenever the topic came up: when I was playing my favorite class of all time, in any MMORPG, the Disciple in Vanguard, I did have a rotation.

Well, of sorts. It wasn't hard-coded. I did vary it a bit. But in essence, there was an order in which I pressed the buttons and I followed that order in nearly every fight. And it was great!

Why did I do it there, when I didn't do it anywhere else? Because the Disciple relies on builders and finishers and they are displayed on-screen in such a way as to be blindingly obvious and extremely easy to understand. You press some buttons to kick and punch and after a few of rounds of that some other buttons light up and you press those to heal yourself or debuff or do damage. 

It's a very simple system as used in countless games but the Disciple is by a long way the most intuitive and organic version of the mechanic I've experienced. It has an amazing rhythm to it that makes playing the class feel like playing an instrument or dancing. It's very satisfying when you get it right and as I read Kaylriene's post, which goes into great detail on why and how rotations operate, I finally felt a glimmer of understanding as to why people might not just feel getting one right was necessary but also why they might even enjoy it.

That was my epiphany, such as it was and with that insight, looking beyond that one class and character, I can now see elements of kinds of rotation in the gameplay of a number of classes I've enjoyed playing. The cyclical nature, the repetition and the predictability have a kind of zen-like appeal, particularly when you find a rhythm. Rather than being restrictive, the pattern frees the mind from outside interruptions and allows entrance to the fabled "zone".

Or it can do, when it works. On the other hand, when it doesn't, what you get is grindingly dull, slavish drudge-work, the hallmark of one or two classes I can think of (Looking at you, LotRO Guardian...) 

So, in conclusion, thanks to Kaylriene I feel I now have a clearer understanding of the rotational concept and a better appreciation of its merits. I'll try not to be so openly sneering about it in future.

I had something to say about the whole "One Button" thing, too, but that's going to have to wait for another time. Seems like I had more than enough to say about the subject after all.

Woe Is Me!

Sometimes you don't know what you'll do 'til it's done, as Joni Mitchell almost said. Only yesterday I was whining on about how I always mean to play EverQuest II and never do and now guess what? I played EQII!

More specifically, I played some of the new expansion, instead of prepping for it, which is just about all I've done since Scars of Destruction dropped back before Christmas. It was all very spur-of-the-moment. I logged in mainly to collect my monthly 550DBC stipend and on a whim I ported into Port Woe, the intentionally unattractive starting area in Sodden Archipelago, the expansion's equally unattractive opening zone.

Place names in the real world often reflect either their physical situation or the attitude of the people who named them. That convention holds true here. Unlike those really annoying games, where everywhere seems to have been named by upsetting a Scrabble board, Port Woe is unironically miserable and its hinterland undeniably waterlogged. Things do improve somewhat as you move further inland but at no point, at least no point that I've reached yet, does any of it start to look attractive.

This, it has to be said, is a risky strategy for a game to adopt. I was skeptical when the EverQuest Show attempted to spin the approach as both worthwhile and successful, claiming "... the direction of creating more realistic unique landscapes like swamps, highlands, and rocky outcrops is a much more demanding task, to do it well. And the artists do."

Yes, well, maybe. A more detached observer, however, might conclude that as a twenty year-old game whose graphics have not aged as well as they might have done, leaning into the things the tools are good at, like the vibrant colors and lush foliage seen in several recent expansions, might be a safer option than trying to make stagnant water and bare rock look appealing.

It's not all about looks, though, is it? It's about story and gameplay and progression. Isn't that why we come here?

Up to a point. I do like to have nice things to look at while I'm playing, all the same. So it is indeed a compliment to the devs that I found time zipping past this morning even while I struggled badly to find anything worth taking a picture of for the blog post I knew I'd be writing later.

If I'm going to be strictly accurate, it wasn't really the story that jollied me along, either. I think there is one but I'd be hard put to tell you what it was. Granted, I did the introduction a couple of months ago and now I'm back to do the follow-up I've forgotten the finer details but I have a feeling that, even at the time, I was never clear on why I was in Port Woe or what the Big Crisis was supposed to be.

Let's see if I can precis the story so far without looking anything up. Hmm....

Some bunch I never heard of before, by the name of The Open Hand, got in touch with me to go someplace I'd also never heard of before, to intervene in some sort of burgeoning problem that was going to be bad because... I have no idea why. 

When I got there the locals didn't like me or trust me. A bunch of adventurers had apparently turned up and started running around, riling up the indigenous bad guys, firstly a bunch of Teenage Mutant Turtle lookalikes and more importantly the inevitable tribe of militaristic orcs that shows up wherever you go in Norrath, with whom the Port Woeians were barely holding their own through a policy of kow-towing and forelock-tugging and basically keeping their heads down. 

Naturally, I got the job of ingratiating myself with the locals, trying to convince them I and my new best friends, who I barely knew, weren't going to cause a huge heap of trouble then vanish, leaving them to deal with it on their own. As always, getting on their right side took the form of doing menial tasks for anyone too busy or lazy to do them for themselves which, again as always, turned out to be everyone.

Along the way I was able to throw in a few noble acts, like finding unsupervised children, who should surely not have been allowed to go wandering about in the alligator-infested swamps in the first place, and rescuing a bunch of fishermen, who'd managed to get themselves captured by orcs. Isn't that always the way?

All of this eventually got the locals to think of me "kindly", at which point a different bunch of villagers, noticing how gullible I was, suddenly thought of a whole new set of chores for me to do. One of those was to go to some haunted village where all the Kerrans who used to live here died in some unspecified purge or pogrom or natural disaster (Or maybe it was specified but I forgot, which seems more likely.) to steal a baker's dozen of their totems, something that apparently was going to put the willies up either the orcs or the turtles or both.

That village turned out to be the first instanced "dungeon" in the storyline, although I don't think we call them dungeons any more. Very few of them are underground, anyway. This one wasn't.

I'll quit with the story-so-far at this point because, as must be clear, I have no clue what it is. The last time I remember there being an actual narrative, as opposed to a string of chores with some flavor text, was probably the first time I zoned in back in December. I'm trusting that at some point an actual plot will develop, probably with guest appearances from a few Norrathian celebrities and a climax featuring a demi-god or two. That is the go-to format for EQII expansions, after all.

What I will say is that the instance was fun. I really enjoyed it. I went in blind, didn't look anything up, didn't even have the Wiki open. I thought I'd try winging it, see how it went, then back off and do the research when things fell apart. But they never did.

There were five bosses. All of them were tank&spank or at least I tanked and spanked them all. That alone would earn the instance at least a B+ in my book. I wish every boss in every game was T&S or more properly T&S-friendly. I don't mind them having clever mechanics for those that like that sort of thing, so long as I can ignore them. I just want to stand there and hit stuff until it falls over and this morning that's what I did.

Which is not to say the bosses didn't have resources. Two of them did serious knockbacks that sent me flying high into the air and at least two also summoned loads of adds. Happily for me, I had my Featherfall cloak on, so all I had to do was gently float back down to carry on the fight. As for adds - I was playing my Berserker ffs. He thrives on adds!

Even better, not one of the bosses had any of the more irritating passive abilities used by devs in recent times to make the fights more "challenging". The one I really, really hate is the huge mana drain every bloody boss used to be given that meant I often ended up spending ten or fifteen minutes auto-attacking the buggers to death. That was fun.

The other, newer trick is for bosses to become invulnerable to all damage except what comes from Heroic Opportunities. That one gained currency right after the big HO revamp, surprise surprise. It's far less irritating than the mana drain but it's still hokey and trite so I hope we've seen the back of it.

With none of that nonsense in play I was able to explore the dungeon (Sorry, Instance.) at my own pace. Not that there was a lot to look at. Some instances in EQII can be genuinely gorgeous, especially the ones with a lot of tiling and statuary, but this was a long-deserted mountain village, originally populated by relatively primitive cat-people, so there weren't a whole lot of photo opportunities. At least one of the bosses had a model I hadn't seen before. though, so that was nice.

As far as mobs went, there were a lot of undead Kerrans and a lot of rats. Really a lot of rats. At one point I was swarmed by what looked like a dozen or so and that was one encounter. I haven't seen a mob of mobs like that since the deer in Thundering Steps. It was novel.

It was also easy because it seems all that work I did prepping has paid off. In the past, the first instance in an EQII expansion has sometimes been a little rough. They have been tuned a little high at times and anyone going in unprepared tended to have a difficult time of it. Since they added the Tishan's Box at the start and put in a tutorial to make sure you make full use of it, that's improved a lot. 

I also had good food and drink, the new mercenary, mount and familiar and I'd had my Jeweller make me Expert level Combat Arts for most of my main attacks, so I was about as well-set as a casual was likely to be. And now I'm better set even than that because three of the five bosses dropped upgrades I could - and did - use.

The other two dropped items a Berserker can't wear but those will be passed on to someone who can. I have someone who can use everything, pretty much. I was happy to see all the boss chests were metal this time around. Last expansion there was a disheartening switch to Treasured quality drops, something I did not appreciate, even though the stats may have been the same. It's the look of the thing, don't you know?

I'm trying to do the Adventure and the Tradeskill questlines at the same time because there are some welcome synergies. The Crafting line is much shorter and faster and you get to fly in the expansion zones as a reward for finishing it. It relies on gaining faction with Port Woe, though, as does the Adventure line, and Adventurers gain that faction much faster.

With a bit of swapping I should be able to make each of them feel easier and therefore more fun. Easier is always more fun for me. I used to wonder about that but I'm pretty convinced now it's true. 

There is a sense of satisfaction from overcoming more challenging content, I'll not deny it, but after decades of playing games like this, I'm convinced a fleeting sense of satisfaction rarely compensates for the hours of frustration experienced achieving it. 

It's the old banging your head against a wall thing, isn't it? Lovely when it stops but surely better never to started all that unnecessary head-banging in the first place.

And since I've clearly wandered off the point and clambered onto my soapbox, I'll leave it there. It's nice to be back on the old horse, anyway. Let's hope I don't fall off again before I get where I'm going.

Like A Finger Pointing At The Sky

Playable Worlds surprised us this week with a post-Christmas weekend testing schedule for the Stars Reach pre-alpha that packed a potential sixteen hours of uptime into a couple of days. It came in the form of four, four-hour playtests, two on Saturday and two on Sunday. 

That's a much better set of options for me, equating to afternoon and late evening-early morning in the U.K. If it becomes a regular event, I ought to be able to get some serious hours in. 

Unfortunately, for this particular weekend, I already had commitments for most of the slots. I was working on Sunday, so that knocked out one whole afternoon and also meant I couldn't stay up late for the Saturday evening either, plus I had things already planned for Saturday before I found out the tests were happening.

Even so, I managed to get about three and a half hours in altogether. Once again things turned out to be fairly productive. Well, in the second session, anyway.

The first session, late on Saturday evening, was a bit of a bust although I can't say I didn't enjoy myself. I logged in with the intention of working on my Civic Engineering so I could start building myself a home but I couldn't remember what I needed to do. It had been a while since last time and I'd comppletely forgotten everything I'd learned.

Next time: less mining, more building!

I spent a while reading the in-game guides but they weren't as helpful as I thought they would be. There's a lot of information there but it seems a little vague at times. mostly, I wanted to know what buttons to press and the guide didn't always want to tell me. Or possibly the information was there but I was too tired to take it in. It was past my bedtime, after all.

Either way, I couldn't find what I needed to know so I decided to go do some prospecting instead. It seemed like a good choice since I knew I was going to need a lot of mats, even if I wasn't sure which ones. Metal and stone seemed like a likely bet so I set off to look for some. I didn't get far.

Wherever it was that I'd logged out at the end of the previous test (I rarely remember.) it seemed to be positively infested with vicious killer wildlife. As soon as I'd dug a few holes, a pack of Owldeer galloped up and started jostling me. I believe Owldeer may have been made less aggressive than they used to be but they're still ready for a fight when they can find one so I had to go on the defensive.

I swapped to the electric arc gun, the Omniblaster, and started blasting away, all the while backpedalling, which seems to be the preferred method. I wasn't doing too well until a couple of the deer fell into one of the holes I'd dug and couldn't get out.

Can't Climb. Can't Jump. Can run a little.

This amused the hell out of me, I can tell you. It also opened up hilarious possibilities for future gameplay, something I fully intend to explore when I have the leisure. I happily electrocuted the trapped deer and looted the corpses. Then I picked off the rest of the herd from the safety of the far side of some more rough terrain, leading the creatures into holes whenever I could get them to go the right way.

That was fun. Since combat was going so well and I was feeling bloodthirsty, I abandoned my mining plans and set about murdering as much of the wildlife as I could. I wanted to try using the FPS-mode central reticule to see if it made things any easier, anyway, so I thought it seemed like a good time. 

It took me a while to figure out how to swap between the reticule and the cursor. It's Tab. Everything is Tab, as I know now. That was a bit of a game-changer for me. It only took me, what, half a dozen sessions and over six hours to figure it out, too! I'm fairly sure most people worked it out in a matter of minutes. I wish I had. It does make quite a difference.

Not to combat, though, or not for me, anyway. Once I'd swapped to the reticule, I didn't find it much of an improvement. I found it hard to tell the difference, in fact, so I swapped back to using the cursor, which at least had the benefit of familiarity.

After about half an hour of steady slaughter, I'd accrued enough Combat xp to buy everything that was left on the Combat tree. I already had most of it from all the fighting I'd been forced to do in earlier tests. Again, most of it hasn't improved things any so far.

That largely because most of what you get for your points are crafting recipes. A few options, like the triple-attack, take immediate effect but mostly they just give you recipes for things you have to make. And there it's the same old story: I never have quite the right mats.

Nighttime. Better get to bed. Sun'll be up in five minutes.

Realising that, I decided I'd had enough for that session. As I said, I was too tired to concentrate and I knew I had to be up early for work the next morning, so even though Mrs Bhagpuss and Beryl were asleep and the test had a couple more hours to run, I gave up and logged out.

The next night, Sunday, I was ready the moment the servers came up at 10pm my time. I logged in and the game crashed. I've had more crashes these past two tests than in the ones before Christmas but it was still only a handful and I was always able to get back in immediately, so not really much of a problem.

I wanted to go back to my original plan of getting to grips with the new Homesteading systems, which once again meant first reading the manual to try and remember what I was supposed to be doing. This time I had better luck, possibly because I was awake. 

I worked out, after some trial and error, that I needed specific, hard, rocky materials like Gneiss or Marble to make the blocks the Instaformer requires. Using the Instaformer is what gives you Civic Engineering xp but it's taken me all this time to figure out how to use it. 

I didn't have enough of any of the right rocks to make even a single block so it was off to the mines again. At least this time I knew what I was looking for. Sadly, I didn't know where to look for it.

My first thought was to go look in space because that's where I found all the good stuff before. Space, however, does not seem to be the go-to place for rock. I came away with a lot of metal and a few gems but none of the rocks I needed. On the positive side, I didn't run into a single space monster so it was quite peaceful while I was looking.

I don't know what it is but I don't like the look of it.

Back planetside, I decided just to wander around and keep my eyes open for anything that looked promising, like a cliff face or a big boulder. That has to be where the rocks are, doesn't it? Before I got started on that, though, I remembered that in a previous test I'd bought the option to survey the environment for minerals. That sounded like just what I needed. Might as well give it a try.

It turned out to be avery good decision, if not at all in the way I'd imagined. Trying to figure out how to use mt surveying and assessing skills led to a series of discoveries that, frankly, I should have made back in the second or third test. Things that are pretty much essential for playing the game buit which I've been doing without this whole time.

For example, anyone who's been reading Wilhelm's Stars Reach write-ups will have noticed he regularly talks about people freezing stuff or setting it on fire. I have been wondering how to do that ever since I started. Well, now I know.

I'm not going to tell you though because if you're in the test program you already know (I have to be the last person there to work it out, surely...) and if you're not it would just be a bunch of meaningless, technical detail. The important part is that I can now freeze lakes and set forests on fire along with the rest of them and boy, is it fun! No wonder people keep on doing it.

I can also turn back time, allegedly, although I think a couple of pages in the manual might have been stuck together when I read it. When I point the Suitcase Bomb (Not the actual name.) at a patch of land, the ground turns into lava and bubbles, then mostly cools down into the same thing it was before. 

Wouldn't want to be the guy who lives at the bottom of the hill.

I thought it was supposed to turn into something else. I expect I'm doing it wrong. Once again, though, it's such fun to do, I don't really care. This game is made for vandals and nihilists as much as it is for creators and collectivists, as far as I can tell. There are going to be some sparks flying between the two camps when it gets into the hands of players more interested in making either mischief or their mark than the current crop of testers, I'm fairly sure of that.

If this report sounds random and chaotic, it's because that's what the whole of my near-two-hour session was like. I kept discovering new things the tools could do, trying them out, finding out it was spectacularly destructive and carrying on just for the hell of it. 

I did so much Prospecting (Aka destroying the environment.) I earned more than enough points to fill out the entire Mineralogy Tree. I hugely increased the size of my Hopper (Don't. Please. We're all adults here.) as well as the yeild and the efficiency with which rocks melt. Then I used my newfound skills to  turn everything around me into a barren, pitted, smouldering wasteland.

So that was fun. And also surprisingly productive. I found the ability to Assess things to see what mats they contain, along with the skill that supposedly allows you to survey the area to find what you're looking for, both very little help but just blasting everything in sight with a firehose of purple energy bolts was fantastically effective. 

I stood well back and played the stream across any and every surface indiscriminately until I spotted something boiling out of the plasma that looked like it might be useful. That's how I discovered Coal and Marble and a few other materials I'd never found before.

Nothing worth having down here. Leave it for some other sucker to fill in.

Once I hit something I wanted, like Marble, I went after it like a rabid pit-bull. I ripped up the landscape and spewed the debris back onto the ground like it was Eastern Europe in the 1930s. It was glorious. Also wholly unforgiveable. Stars Reach is going to set the worst possible environmental example if it doesn't rein some of this in before launch. It's a good thing playing video games doesn't affect anyone's behavior or attitude in the real world...

After half an hour of that I had enough Marble to make a couple of blocks with the Lathe. It was also about then that I was thinking of giving up. If it took that long just to make two blocks...

Luckily, one block from the Lathe equates to twenty blocks from the Instaformer. Once I realised that, I was able to lay down enough marble to give me about forty points of xp in Civic Engineering. It seems you earn roughly a point per block extruded.

That was the good news. The bad news is that it takes a hundred points to buy anything on the CE Tree and two hundred to buy anything good. Back to the mines for more Marble!

In the end, I managed to dig out enough to get me 120 xp. Eighty more and I can buy the recipe for the Fabricator, the tool I need to start building an actual house. I think. I hope...

Meanwhile, without really meaning to, I seem to have stored up enough xp in most of the other skills to come close to maxing out their respective Trees. Again, that frequently just means acquiring recipes that need to be crafted but I'm slowly beginning to come to terms with how that works.

Ever hear the expression "One banana short of a plaster"?

For example, I now know that I was right when I said, last time, that I thought I remembered seeing some kind of cooking station in a camp. There is indeed something called a Stove that apppears in your camp, whenever you set it up. How I couldn't find one in my camp, when I looked for it then, I have no idea. I found it this time with no trouble at all.

Still couldn't make anything on it, of course. Didn't have the mats. It takes a suprising amount of bananas to make a banana plaster. Or maybe, like blocks, they come in packs of twenty. When I get a few more I'll hit the Stove and find out.

Meanwhile, other people are clearly making far more progress than I am. That dinky little hamlet people were calling a city last time (So cute!) is now genuinely quite impressive. It's still more of a small town or a large village than a city but it's starting to look quite sophisticated.

A hell of a lot more sophisticated than my pathetic attempt at a Homestead, that's for sure. All I have is a lot of holes and a weird marble abstract that looks like some pre-schoolers tried to make a Henry Moore out of half-chewed Mentos. In a toxic waste dump.

The good thing about it (The only good thing, really.) is that I ought to be able to find it again next time. I even put up a flagpole so I can see it from far away. Don't have a flag yet but the pole is big enough to be seen from space. (Not literally from space. From space you literally can't even see the planet.)

Want to know what's keeping it up? A vitriolic hatred of all that's decent and good!

 It's my third Homestead, by which I don't mean the third I've made but the third of the three I currently own. The other two are... well, if you find them, I'd be very grateful if you could give me a hint as to where they are. I put them down, went off to do something, then couldn't find them again.

You can put down map markers to tell you where points of interest, like your house, might be but the flaw with that is that you have to remember to do it while you still know where they are. By the time I remember, it's always too late. I do think we at least ought to get a permanent "You Live Here" sign in the UI. And some way of abandoning homesteads remotely.

Fortunately for me, by the time I realized I was never going to be able to find my way home, I still had one deed left so I was able to start over, yet again. At least this time I've left a permanent marker in the world to show me where I live. 

If there isn't a wipe, when the next test comes, I'll carry on from where I left off. This time I'll see if I can't at least get some walls up. Maybe even a roof but let's not get too fancy.

The Dream Is Over

What did you do after lunch on Christmas Day? I played video games! 

Well, one video game: Wuthering Waves. I managed to get in a longish session, right after we finished Christmas lunch and Mrs Bhagpuss and Beryl were both comatose with food exhaustion. We'd done all our socialising before the big day so it was just the three of us, which is how we like it. 

We'd opened all our (Many!) presents, taken Beryl for a walk, cooked and eaten lunch and done everything except pull the crackers which, once again, we forgot. Seriously, we've had the same box - a dozen Moomin-themed crackers - for at least three years now and I think we've maybe pulled four of them. I even said on Christmas Eve that we mustn't forget again. And then we forgot!

Anyhoo... getting back to the point and without any more uneccesary biographical detail, what happened was I sat down in front of the PC, wondering what to play and decided it ought to be Wuthering Waves. There was an event I wanted to do.

It's called Depths of Illusive Realm and it's been running for weeks. I mentioned it in the last post I wrote about the game, which was all the way back in November, when I said I'd done the first chapter. Back then, it seemed like there'd be more than enough time to get it all done but time has an unfortunate habit of passing and it was dawning on me that there might not be all that much of it left, at least where this particular event was concerned.

The "Caution- Wet Surface" sign's a nice touch - but shouldn't it be on the ceiling?

Even though it's there or thereabouts my favorite game of the year (There may be a post on Favorites of the Year if I can get it together to collate the lists and write it.) I hadn't really played much Wuthering Waves since mid-November. I did get in a couple of unreported sessions, taking me well into The Black Shores, but as I keep mentioning, my game-playing is at an historic low in the lifetime of the blog just now. My spotty attendance record is no reflection on Wuthering Waves itself, just more evidence of a general decline in gaming activity (Whatever Steam says to the contrary.)

Even so, my attitude to Wuthering Waves is puzzling. I've been pondering on exactly why it might be that I play the game in such a sporadic fashion, given it's supposed to be my gaming crush of the moment.  I think I've figured it out (And I know I've said it before.). It's because it doesn't actually feel like playing a game at all. It's more like watching a movie.

Every time I play I have a really great time but most of it is watching cut scenes and enjoying the story. There's a fair amount of button-pressing to keep the dialog moving and there are always a few fights sprinkled in, along with some puzzles to solve, all of which tends to be quick and easy enough not to interrupt the narrative flow. Once in a while there's a Big Boss Fight, which can put a bit of a damper on things from my perspective but even those generally aren't too off-putting. I could do without them, personally, but I've experienced far worse in lots of other games.

In a two or three hour session, though, it feels like at least two-thirds of the time is spent watching other characters do stuff and listening to other characters talk to each other. That makes it feel distinctly like watching an anime TV show or a movie, albeit with interactive elements.

Not for the first time, I sense someone's personal experience leeching into the plot.

The sensation is enhanced by the enigmatic portrayal of the player-character. The developers went for a peculiar design aesthetic: a weird see-sawing between a silent protagonist and an almost omniscient narrator. 

At times, my character just nods, makes gestures and looks vague. At others, she has full, voice-acted dialog. When she does speak, it's often in voice-over, revealing her private thoughts and giving her interpretations on what's happening. It feels like the actor's commentary in the extras on a DVD.

The overall effect is that if I get stuck into the storyline and finish a standalone section, like a chapter or even a whole event, I come away feeling more like I watched a movie than played a game. It's satisfying but it take a while before I feel like doing it again.

Alternatively, if I just potter around, doing shorter side quests and dailies or just exploring the gorgeous world, then it feels much more like playing a game. That's fun but it doesn't progress my character anything like as much as the main storyline quest would. It's a bit of the old Catch 22.

All of which is really much more my problem than anything the game is doing wrong. I'm also aware that I'm not approaching the whole enterprise in the way the developers would expect. I think I'm supposed to press on through the story tothe end and then do a lot of repeititive "content", like in every other live service game. I just never seem to get the hang of it.

They do keep an eye on this sort of thing, fortunately. There are frequent surveys and questionaires you can opt in to complete and many of the questions revolve around playstyles and preferences. I get the feeling they're doing what they can to accomodate everyone.

Suure... until you murder me!

I'm veery happy to give my input. I completed a survey just recently that had multiple questions concerning how much combat there should be in story quests, how hard it should be and so on. Naturally I expressed a preference for the minimum possible interruption to the story but I fear it may be a minority opinion. 

Based on past experience with multiple games, my impression is that the more hardcore players think they are, the more they complain and those who make the most noise are likeliest to have an influence on how the game develops. In-game surveys at least make some attempt to garner a range of opinions although there's still a strong element of self-selection.

With that in mind I always expect things to get more annoying rather than less as a game ages but after my time with the current event on Christmas Day I'm mildly optimistic my fears may prove to be unfounded, at least in this case. I was able to finish the whole of the event storyline, which is substantial, in a couple of sessions, mainly because it turned out it had been tuned to make it impossible to lose any of the significant fights, even the big finish with the final boss.

It took me a while to figure that out. A while back, I did some very necessary work on upgrading my combat capabilities and it paid off to some extent. Even so, I'm still extremely bad at this kind of action combat so having better gear is only ever going to get me so far.

Nevertheless, I was winning all my fights quite handily - until I ran into one opponent who seemed to be determined to give me a really good thrashing. I kept expecting to die but somehow I never quite did and when the victory finally came, it was by the slimmest conceivable margin - my character had just a single hit point left.

It all happens so fast , it's only in the screenshots I get to see who we were fighting.

I was so surprised, I took a screenshot to prove it, although I can't find it now. It just wasn't, as I thought, amazing good luck. It was because, as I eventually figured out, the event has been designed to make it literally impossible to lose. 

In the finale, you have to battle the main villain, who summons several boss mobs from earlier in the game, resulting a string of explosive, confusing and spectacular fights. I spent some considerable time in a couple of rounds hanging on by just a single hit point. But I never died. As far as I can tell, the player character can't die.

If I've gotten that right it's a very welcome design choice. It meant that I was able to enjoy the fights for once, instead of constantly worrying about having to start over. I don't mind relatively long boss fights so long as I'm certain I only have to do them once. 

I'm not going to go into too much detail about the story or gameplay in the outgoing event, save to say that I found it all excellent. The dialog was well-written, the voice acting was convincing, the plot was intriguing and the action was enjoyable. 

The story revolves around an attempted incursion of the Somnoire dreamworld into reality. Either that or it's a stare-down between a two cats. One or the other. Over several chapters we get to see the dreams of some established characters as well as those of a couple of newcomers, both of whom seem like fine additions to the ever-growing cast. As each dream is resolved (They all feature anxiety issues or something similar.) that character takes a place in the deserted railway cariage until finally there's a full team, ready to go take on the villain behind the whole thing.

Camellya: Rover's flirty frenemy, the one who ends every fight dangling from some kind of sex-swing. Or that's what it looks like. Maybe it's just me...

It's an excellent conceit and structuraly I found it very satisfying. Who doesn't enjoy getting the team back together? 

I had a lot of fun. It made for a highly entertaining Christmas afternoon and a first-class alternative to watching The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which is what I'd have been doing if we'd followed our usual pattern and slumped on the sofa in front of whatever animated movie the BBC had programmed for a stupified nation to sleep through after Christmas lunch

I'm not sure if the Illusive Realm narrative content will disappear from the game entirely, when the event comes to an end a few days, or whether it's just the ancillary content that will go. I hope it stays. It's much too good to waste on a one-off apppearance.

Coming after is something much bigger than a mere event. According to the official Wuthering Waves website, 2 January sees the launch of Wuthering Waves Version 2.0.

I'm still a bit vague on exactly what that entails. I'm hoping it's just a hyperbolic way of saying the game is getting even bigger, not that the current game is going to change. In my opinion it doesn't need to be mucked about with. It's more than fine as it is.

Having watched the trailer and skimmed the promotional material, it seems we'll be getting a new continent, Rinascita, along with something called the Echo Fiesta and something else called All Silent Souls Can Sing. The website is so much style over content, though, I can't be sure what any of it  means.

Whatever it turns out to be, I'll most likely get to it in a separate post, nearer the time. For now, I'm just reporting that I'm done with Depths of Illusive Realm. It was great and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Can't ask for more than that.

Death Only Makes Me Stronger

I imagine most people have better things to do on the last weekend before Christmas than read several thousand words about a game they won't be able to play for years, so I'll keep this short. Well, short for me, anyway.

I only managed to make one of the two remaining Stars Reach tests this week and that only for about an hour, so I was more than a little surprised by how much progress I made. As I suspected, it does help if you come in with a goal in mind and stick to it instead of wandering around all over the map, doing the first thing that comes to hand.

Since I knew I didn't have long, I decided to try and craft myself something useful that I could use next time, when I might have longer to play. My first thought was some of those banana plasters I was talking about last time but I couldn't figure out what I needed. 

Thinking about it now, I imagine you probably need to go down the Botany line and buy the recipe there but what station you'd use to craft a plaster I have no idea. When I placed my camp I could only see two -  the Lathe and the Toolmaker. 

I could have sworn I remembered seeing some kind of cooking station in someone else's camp in one of the earlier tests but now I think I must have imagined it. You probably just craft food and supplies through the general UI.

Shelving that plan, I moved on to the Instaformer. This is the thing you need to make to make the things you need to make to raise Civic Engineering, the skill you need to make houses. Need, make, need... Damn game in a nutshell.

I died so many times I became a ghost for good. Not sure if that was a bug or a feature.

I already knew I had two-thirds of the mats necessary: Tier 1 Metal and Gemstones. You need twenty of each and thanks to salt counting as a gemstone, I had plenty of both. 

The ingredient I was missing was Inert Gas, which drops inconveniently and in my opinion ludicrously from non-terran animals. Basically, if it looks like something you might see on a walk in the countryside, on a farm or in a zoo, it has a chance of dropping a canister of Reactive Gas when you kill it but if it looks like a six-year old child dreamt it up in the throes of a fever, it might drop canisters of Inert Gas instead.

I seriously hope this gets changed before the game goes before a live audience because it's very hard to justify on any level. For now, though, that's how it is so we have to deal with it.

It's not just the aesthetic I find objectionable, it's the gameplay implications too. As a player, I don't like the way crafting and construction are connected so directly to combat. When there's a functioning economy, players who enjoy the thrill of the chase will be able to handle the killing, while crafters and builders stay at home and buy the mats they need at market. Then it won't be a problem but for now, when player-to-player trading has barely been implemented in even the most basic fashion, if you want to craft you have to hunt.

And hunting is hard. Or, I should say, it's finicky. I've seen it described favorably as "arcade-like" but I just find it irritating. I'd far rather use a melee weapon than a ray-gun anyway so I'm already miffed before we get to the mechanics. I hope there will be melee options eventually.

Since there I had no choice but to use the gun, I upgraded my Omniblaster to fire three shots at once. That completely did for the Jackalopes but despite not being an actual, real-world animal (Shope papillomavirus doesn't count.) they didn't drop Inert Gas. Or maybe that was Jackrabbits. I know the one turns into the other but which I was killing I couldn't tell you.

Run, Catgirl, Run!

Luckily for me, right next to where I'd set up camp was a spawn of Ballhogs or whatever the floaty airbag critters are called. Unluckily for me, it was a really big spawn. Even more unluckily, Ballhogs seem to be a lot less susceptible to Omniblaster fire than Jackalopes.

To be fair, when I first started in on the Ballhogs I was buoyed by my success with the rabbits - and even they'd managed to kill me once. The Ballhogs killed me over and over again. 

That, however, was my plan.

On my first death it had occurred to me that, since I was able to respawn at my camp, mere meters away, it might be feasible to get my Inert Gas by way of suicide. It was taking me mere seconds to get back to collect my gravemarker and dying reset my health so it seemed like it might work. True, dying did also reduce my maximum hit points but I was curious to see how low that would take them and this seemed like a good way to find out.

I'd also spotted that loot, which you have to run over to collect, hangs around for a while, so as long as I could kill at least one Ballhog before I died, I'd be able to get back and pick up whatever it dropped before it disappeared. Neon was what I was after but it isn't a guaranteed drop. I had one already and the recipe asks for ten so I was estimating I'd need to kill fifteen or twenty Ballhogs to get what I needed.

Don't ask me how many I killed in the end. Don't ask me how many times I died, either. A lot is my best estimate for both. I can say that my maximum HP stopped going down somewhere around 50% of where I started. Stamina fell too but not so far.

I had a pattern going but there was an interruption to the routine when my camp timed out and vanished, meaning I respawned at the center of the zone instead. It took me a few more deaths and some annoyingly long corpse-runs runs before I figured out what had happened but once I'd re-made my camp things went back to normal.

I hope this is worth it.

On the majority of attempts, I failed to kill any Ballhogs at all. They freeze you and kill you while you're frozen, one of the worst pieces of design in any MMORPG. Everyone hates it. Most games that use it end up dropping it. 

I realise there's probably something you can craft to stop it happening but in my book any penalty that can be removed by applying a fix should never have been in the game to begin with. Gameplay that relies on returning something to a neutral state can never be either fun nor satisfying.

Sometimes, when I did kill a Ballhog, I either didn't get back in time to loot it or couldn't find the loot that had dropped. Other people were hunting the spawn so I don't know if they might have picked up my loot. I saw other players' loot lying around but I was too polite to go see if I could steal it. I guess I should at least have tested that once, at least. I keep forgetting I'm not playing a live game.

A few times I managed to get a bunch of Ballhogs dead in my sights and blast them with the triple-ray. That got me a few kills. One way or another, my Neon collection slowly built up and after I'd been at it for maybe half an hour I had the ten canisters I needed. I also had a canister of Helium, another Inert Gas, but if it's possible to mix-and-match them to make up the required total, I couldn't figure out how to do it.

Back at camp I opened up my Toolmaker, popped in my metal, gas and gems, pressed Craft and out popped my Instaformer. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself by then, even though I'd gone about the whole enterprise in the most primitive, brute-force way imaginable. 

I was looking forward to finding out what my new toy could do, when the server suddenly came down. I hadn't been watching the clock. The test was over.

Next time, whenever that is (After Christmas, presumably or maybe even after New Year.) I'll be ready to get to work on raising my Civil Engineering skill so I can start building myself some kind of shack. Always presuming there isn't a wipe, of course.

Please don't let there be a wipe. I'm not sure I could go through all that again.