Old Men, Cats And Emily Bronte

I've had a bunch of ideas for posts about Wuthering Waves bumping around in the back of my mind for a while now, all waiting their turn to be spun up into posts of their own but instead I think I'll just stuff a few into a Friday Grab-Bag get them out there before they go stale.

Before I do, though, I'd like to thank Naithin once again for introducing me to the game, which quite honestly I doubt I'd even have heard of, had he not mentioned it in passing. I've played every day since then and it's been a joy.

I'd also like to thank whoever it was at Kuro Games who thought of naming it Wuthering Waves. Without that, I doubt Naithin's nudge would have moved the dial on my interest.

I still don't know why the game is called what it is. As Redbeard pointed out in the comments, there's really only one association anyone is going to make when they see it and that's Emily Bronte's novel. (Okay, I suppose someone might think of the Genesis album, Wind and Wuthering, but I very much doubt it. And anyway, even that title was inspired by the book.)

At first blush it seems like a bizarre choice, given the game's obvious skew towards a younger audience and the fact that it's, well, a video game made in China but it isn't such an outlandish idea as all that. I don't know how things are elsewhere but where I live the classics are very big with a certain youthful demographic right now. At work, we've hugely expanded our Classic Fiction section and the substantive majority of customers browsing it are teens and twenty-somethings, seemingly buying the books to read for pleasure as much as to study. 

Whether it has anything to do with Tik-Tok I'm not sure, although most trends in bookselling do these days. Among the black spines, though, there have always been certain titles that seem to hold an innate fascination for adolescent and college-age readers. Wuthering Heights holds a prime position on that list.

You might think, if there was a connection of some kind, there'd be evidence of it in the theme or setting but if there is, I haven't been able to spot it. I'm not a big fan of the Brontes but I do know the plots of just about all the novels and I don't recall a lot of magic, guns, monsters or swinging from rooftop to rooftop on a grappling-hook in any of them. 

There is some romance in Wuthering Waves but it's far from central to any of the plots. Most of it so far involves the middle-aged and elderly, of which more later. Pretty-boy villain (Or is he the anti-hero?) Scar does have a little of Heathcliff's smoldering arrogance about him but if it's having the traditional effect on any character in the game they're not on my team. 

However the name came about, I do get the feeling someone at Kuro must have studied Eng. Lit. at college. I just finished a side-quest where I had to go stand in for a guard who hadn't turned up for his shift. I had to hang around at the top of a tower until he turned up, which he did not. The quest was called Wait for Godo.

It's the kind of detail which contributes significantly to my affection for the game, unsurprisingly. If we're going to have irrelevant cultural icons casually shoe-horned into our fantasy roleplaying games, I'd sooner have have Emily Bronte and Samuel Beckett than Haris Pilton any day. And I like Paris Hilton...

Since I mentioned the possible intended age profile of the audience, I feel I ought to offer a retraction of something I said in my Very First Impressions post. I described Wuthering Waves as "an anime world, where no-one looks much over eighteen even if they turn out to be the Magistrate in charge of the city." 

This doesn't give a fair or true impression of the population of Jinzhou and its hinterlands. There are a lot of fresh-faced young folk, for sure, but also a good number of citizens of middle years and more than a sprinkling of elders. Perhaps more surprisingly, senior citizens, particularly retirees, feature prominently in a number of side quests.

In one such quest I enjoyed, my pal Chixia asked me to have a word with her grandfather, who was having some kind of problem. It turned out he was infatuated with a very elegant elderly neighbor, who sadly seemed resistant to his charms. 

The sprightly old fellow wanted to come hunting with us so he could add some more daunting "Echoes" (Hologramatic images of defeated monsters.) to his somewhat feeble collection. For some reason he thought this would influence the woman to receive his attentions favorably. 

It did not. She was singularly unimpressed. I think she thought he was an embarrassment, frankly, and who could blame her? I was embarrassed for him. He, however, seemed perfectly fine about it all. Ah, the resilience of age.

That quest was mostly played for laughs. Another, centering on a retired photo-journalist, who wanted to take some final photographs of locations in the city that held special meaning for him, but who was no longer spry and agile enough to climb up to the vantage points he'd reached in his youth, had a much more elegaic tone. 

Another, lengthy questline involved a senior executive at a mining installation who was beginning to suffer from age-related memory loss. The topic was handled with surprising delicacy, although the translation did it no favors.

All the quests came with a wealth of back-story, revealing something about the lives these old men had led in their younger days. The writing in Wuthering Waves employs a lot of those kinds of textures, making the world feel more substantial and grounded than can often be the case in free to play games and mobile ports. 

The occasionally shaky translation makes the nuances harder to appreciate at times but the sentiment usually makes it through, as do some very revealing cultural differences and assumptions. In some less obvious ways, I think this feels like the one of the most Chinese games I've played.

Another somewhat atypical aspect of Wuthering Waves is the way quests recur in varying forms. The one I wrote about, concerning learning the languages of animals, turned out to be the first in an ongoing series. I've talked to dogs and rabbits so far and I hope there will be more. It's a fun sequence.

I also wrote a while back about a quest I was given to find a missing cat. That turned out to be part of a set of dailies in which the person who persuaded me to find the first one kept calling me up on my communicator and asking me to go look for more.

It wasn't just lost cats or cats stuck up trees. There were also kittens to find homes for and at one point I even met some guy who told me he was a member of the Kitty Rescue Team. The only member, as it turned out and also the "better half" of the crazy cat lady who keeps calling me. I was very surprised to find she had a partner, to be honest...

The cat dailies went on for a while. Each time I found and returned a cat I got to give it a name, which was the best reward of all. The cats I named are still strolling around the little park where I left them. I go visit them sometimes. 

After a while the dailies stopped being about cats and started to be about a very bad portrait painter instead. Then it was a guy who was trying to perfect some kind of sales pitch and wanted to try out his material on me. 

Each of these sequences lasted several days, with roughly the same task (Find cat/Sit for portrait/Listen to jokes.) but completely new dialog each time. Two of the three had a continuing narrative while the third was more of a social construct but they were all very different from the kinds of dailies I'm used to. In fact, if the game hadn't told me, I'd just have thought they were regular side-quests.

Every activity in Wuthering Waves comes freighted with story. I can't think of anything I've done in the game that wasn't. It's a notable feature of the game and it's something I very much appreciate, although it's not hard to imagine others finding it equally annoying. Not everyone wants to have to wade through several screens of fundamentally meaningless chatter just to get a daily done.

If you feel that way, this is probably not the game for you. Nothing happens without some NPC giving you their life story, explaining their reasoning, offering some historical background or telling a lengthy anecdote. Every time I go questing I spend considerably more time reading about why I'm doing it and what other characters think about it than I spend actually doing anything to fix whatever the problem might be.

This is where I really wish the translation was better than it is. Not that it's bad. Not at all. By the standards of imported F2P games it's actually pretty good. 

It isn't consistently good enough, however, to land all of these stories with the impact they deserve. Given how involving and entertaining I find them despite the variable quality of the translation, I can't help wondering how much more satisfying they'd be if they were rendered in fully fluent and demotic English throughout.

Translation is a complex and contentious issue that deserves a full post of its own. I'll have to write one some time. Until then, I'll just say I'd rather read good dialog in a less than perfect translation than poor dialog in perfect English any day. It's only when I literally can't figure out what the characters are supposed to be saying that I lose patience.

Finally, on the topic of things in the game being generally just more than they necessarily needed to be, let me introduce you to Maqi, the Pioneer Association Receptionist. She's really keen to tell you what a great organization it is. Boy, is she ever!

The Pioneer Association, previously known as the Universal Geographic Society, is an organization dedicated to exploring and understanding the world. You can get rewards for doing tasks, something that could easily be handled through the UI and explained via a tutorial tip, a process the game makes extensive use of elsewhere. 

In this case, it doesn't. Instead, you have to go to the Association's plush offices in the city and talk to Maqi. 

Maqi is full of information about the Association and its many public-spirited and commercial activities. She was so convincing, I actually went looking around the reception area to see if I could find copies of Wutherium Geographic or Post-Lament Anthropocene. If there'd been a way to sign up for them to be delivered to my mailbox every month, I'd have subscribed on the spot.

Sadly, this all appears to be flavor text. Still, top marks for effort to whoever wrote it. It's this kind of commitment that makes Wuthering Waves such a pleasure to play. How much longer it will continue is another issue. I've been spoiled by launch content then let down by updates before.

Fortunately, the game appears to be somewhat more successful than other recent favorites of mine, so there's an outside chance more content in this vein could follow. 

I won't count on it but it would be nice...

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

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

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

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

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

If at first you don't succeeed...

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

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

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

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

I wonder if Stylist Tony has any red hair dye?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that looks weirdly familiar...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Probably.

Once Human Beta 3 - First Impressions Plus Comparisons With Beta 2

I've sometimes claimed that one of the big benefits of having a blog is being able to look back and compare my memories with what I actually said at the time.  Now, for once, I'm actually going to do it.

The game I'm revisiting is Once Human, which I started playing during Beta 2, back in December of last year, and which I stopped playing, before the beta ended, in the following January. In that relatively short time, I wrote about it quite extensively, posting my First Impressions on 13 December, with lengthy follow-ups on the 14th, 15th, 18th, 19th, 21st, 25th (Yes, Christmas Day!) and 28th.

On 1 January, I posted a very positive "Mid-beta Review" in which I said 

"As far as I can tell, the beta has about another three weeks to run, although I've yet to find an official date. I'm torn between carrying on as I have been, spending almost all my gaming time there and making the most of my access while it lasts, or quitting while I'm ahead to avoid bitter disappointment, when the mean devs take my new toy away. 

What I should probably do is wean myself off the beta gradually, reducing my play-time slowly as I simultaneously re-introduce other, much-neglected games to the mix." 

It seems that's what I did because I didn't post about the game again until 10 January, my last substantive post about it until the start of Beta 3. I skimmed through all of those posts last night. It wasn't a quick read by any standards. I didn't run them through a word counter but I'd be amazed if they come to less than twenty thousand words altogether. Might easily be thirty.

I made some notes as I was reading but given that level of verbosity I imagine I missed a lot. Still, I pulled out enough salient points for a short post. Maybe not that short, if precedent's any guide...

Before I get into the details, I have to say it seems like a lot has changed. Starry, the NetEase studio behind Once Human, is clearly engaged in a genuine beta process here, not just a marketing excercise, although inevitably there's plenty of marketing going on, too. I'm always wary of comparing subjective impressions like this but it was only a couple of months ago I was last playing and the feeling of change in the new beta I was already forming is largely supported by the record.

The whole game feels different this time and I'm not convinced it always feels better. Let's have some details.

Communication Breakdown

There's plenty of praise in my posts on the last beta for both the writing and the voice acting. Nothing I read last night mentioned any jankiness or glitching there. This time, as Scopique observed in his post about the current beta, conversations now sometimes repeat when you reach a decision point in the dialog tree. 

There also seems to be some confusion over whether the player character talks or not. Last time I mentioned my character didn't sound quite how I'd imagined she would. This time she seems to have been afflicted with selective mutism. Sometimes she speaks, other times she settles for gestures and facial expressions.

I'm also noticing more variation between the on-screen text and the voice acting than I remember and for the first time I'm seeing translations that aren't wholly convincing. On the plus side, almost all of the untranslated Chinese text has disappared. 

It seems apparent that both translation and voice-over are works in progress. I hope the final versions match the best on display, which would mean a high standard but I worry things might go the way of so many other imported titles, with quality translation at the start and sporadically in key scenes but something less satisfactory elsewhere. Fingers crossed on that.

The Easy Life

This is a tough one. My immediate impression is that everything feels much easier but when I come to examine why and how that might have come about I find myself somewhat at a loss. I can't nail down any specific changes but on an objective level, comparing my progress now with what I recorded in the last beta, it's undeniable that I've progressed much faster and had far fewer difficult moments. 

It's true that back then it was all completely new to me, while now I'm going through the same content for the second time but I really don't think familiarity and foreknowledge can account for the sheer speed with which I'm flying through the storyline. I've only played a handful of sessions, most of them quite short. but I'm already further ahead than I was by the time I stopped playing last time and, as must be evident from those posts, I played a lot.

Back then, I clearly remember having any number of long, tough fights with regular mobs. There was a lot of running away, healing up and some dying. In one post I mention having to leap out of a window to escape being overwhelmed and in another I talk about being mobbed by wolves while trying to do a quest hand-in. I recall stuff like that happpening pretty much non-stop.

This time there's been nothing like it at all. Everything's been very comfortable, even though in comparison to last beta, my character is far less prepared and not as well-equipped. In fact, I've done almost no prep at all. I've just been winging it with whatever armor and weapons I happen to find. For a while I was even just using whatever ammo I looted from chests although I have now finally made myself some bullets.

I haven't done anything about buffing myself and I haven't looked at any guides or walkthroughs and yet I've somehow managed to beat the first two instance bosses on the first try. Last beta, I didn't even dare take the first of those on until I was four levels above what the game reccomended and I made sure to supply myself with a ton of ammo and healing consumables before I went in. 

This time I rocked up two levels below the suggested minimum, went in with whatever I had on me and won easily, even though I ran out of ammo and had to melee the boss for the last quarter of its health. It felt inevitable I would win and it was fun even though I was totally half-assing it.

As for the second boss, I didn't write about that one last time but as far as I recall I don't think I ever beat it. I remember trying and the attempt being a total pain. No fun at all and it took ages. This time, when I got to to that point in the story I went in to see what would happen and ended up I finishing the instance quite easily, even though the game was throwing a hissy-fit and crashed just after I killed the boss, which unfortunately may have bugged my quest.

I probably need to do a bit more thinking on this but it does seem to me that everything is just a lot easier now and not just the fighting.

No-One Uses Cameras Any More!

Back in December I dedicated much of a post to raving about how great the screesnhot feature in Once Human was. To summarise, at the time you needed to craft an actual, in-game camera before you could take screenshots. Once made, the camera operated like a tool in the game. You had to equip it and point it at things to take pictures. 

I loved it but it seems no-one else did because it's gone. Instead, there's an annoying radial menu you can access immediately. It takes you to the same functionality but all of that immersive granularity has been lost. Or all that irritating busy-work. I guess it depends on your perspective but it's certainly another example of how the game is being simplified.

What's The Driving Age Around Here, These Days?

Acess to everything players consider essesntial seems to have been speeded up. By the time I got a motorbike last time I must have been in my teens. I know I'd already moved house so it must have been a week or two into the game at least. This time I got my driver's permit in my second session. I think I was about level five or six. 

I didn't have to do anything for it, either. An NPC just gave it me. I thought it might be a loaner but I've still got it so I guess it's mine now. I appreciate the convenience but I think I'd rather have built it in my workshop from parts. I'd value it more that way.

Where's The Mayor? ^[1]

In the last beta I didn't post about going to the first town, Deadville, until I'd been playing for five days but I did say I'd already been there a few times so I don't think it can have been that much longer than it was this time. Still, I'm pretty sure I wasn't there in my second session. Both times I didn't go until I was prompted so I think they've bumped a few things up the schedule in the revamped "Journey".

Last time, when I did get to Deadville, it seemed like there was more going on. Claire is still there with her van, offering the same quest but I didn't get any prompts to talk to the Mayor, who used to give the long speech leading into the Keefer Sutherland storyline. I can't imagine that whole sub-plot has been taken out but maybe it's been shifted down the timeline. 

Conversely, I met another guy in Deadville, called Lowe. He's a sharp dresser, who could have come straight out of The Secret World. Was he there before? I'm pretty sure he wasn't but I do seem to recall hearing some of what he has to say, so maybe he's been relocated or his lines have been re-assigned. 

Which leads me to... 

Wow! You've Really Changed Since I Last Saw You!

Don't try to deny it. I have the screenshots to prove it. 

The mysterious girl you meet in the opening cut scenes, who apparently represents the ruined world's best hope for recovery, used to be called Cyo. Now she goes by Mitsuko. Then there's Mary. She used to be a blonde who dressed like a lab assistant on the way to a meeting. Now she's a brunette in Lara Croft's cast-offs.

I'm fairly sure a lot of other NPCs have had a makeover too but I can only prove it for the few whose photos I took.

A Possible Loss Of Whimsy ^[2]

I'm not a hundred per cent certain on this one but I think they may have removed the whole Whim mechanic. If so,  it would be a shame. It was an interesting one. 

The gist of it was that every time you allowed something bad to happen to you, like getting poisoned by polluted water, there'd be some negative effects but you might also gain a "whim", a potentially positive side-effect, like being able to swim further before becoming exhausted. There was a whole theoretical meta-game there, involving taking debuffs to gain specific, situational benefits, that looked like it might be fun. 

I said at the time I thought it would end up being complicated and lead to some awkward choices for min-maxers but it didn't seem like a bad idea altogether. It may still be in the game but I've had a couple of things happen to me that I think would have triggered whims before and nothing's happened. There's been no word of the mechanic in the tutorial yet, either.

I won't write Whims off just yet. They may just have been punted down the timeline or their apparent absence could be a corollary of my moving through content so much faster this time around. Perhaps my whims lie ahead of me still. I hope so, anyway.

In Conclusion...

I could go on but I'm all too aware much of this could resolve itself as I progress and I'd have to come back and explain myself, so I think I'll leave it at that for now. 

What I really wanted to convey is how whole enterprise just feels different, somehow. Specifically, it feels more like a game and less like a virtual world.

I'm not saying it's better or worse. Just different. It's swings and roundabouts, as usual. For every loss of immersion there's an improved quality of life. For each interesting choice that's gone missing, there's one fewer annoying obstacle. If nothing else, I certainly appreciate the less-arduous combat.

At this point I was tempted to invoke the "better-in-beta" argument but I'm beginning to understand that's a more nuanced phenomenon than I've previously allowed. I'm developing a theory that early-mid beta builds tend to include a lot of features that interest developers more than players, which means they tend also to appeal to Explorer archetypes like myself, people who enjoy discovery for its own sake.

In probably too many cases, a lot of those not so user-friendly systems and less-intuitive mechanics, the ones that fascinate those of us who enjoy finding out how things work but which frustrate everyone who just wants to get on with playing a game, get left in for launch and then have to be hastily removed afterwards. It has to be better, commercially and aesthetically, to get all that sanded down in beta but it does explain why I sometimes find the finished product bland and unsatisfying compared to the prototype.

None of which changes my opinion that Once Human is on its way to becoming a pretty good game. What I do anticipate is that when it does launch later this year it won't be quite as weird or wonderful as it could have been. Whether that will harm or enhance its chances of success I guess will depend on just how smoothly Starry are able to handle the transition from the game the developers wanted to make to the one they think players will enjoy. 

At the moment, it looks like they still have some work to do.

[1] - He's still in his room, standing in the dark. He also still has all the dialog that tells you about the area. He just doesn't offer a quest any more, or at least not to me.

[2] - Yeah, this is just wrong. I was misremembering how Whims work. They're caused by decreasing sanity levels, not environmental conditions and they're still in the game. Or the guide explanation for them is, anyway. I haven't gone crazy enough to become whimsical yet.

Gained In Translation

Despite having teed up today's post as some kind of in-depth analysis, it will in fact be a few screenshots interleaved with a short paragraph or two in which I state the bleedin' obvious. This is because I spent the day driving to the next city over with Mrs Bhagpuss, sorting out various fiscal matters, having lunch next to a pride of lions (Bronze. Photographs may follow.) then throwing a ball for Beryl next to a ravine (Okay, it's a gorge but "ravine" sounds much more dramatic.) before driving home the long way round. Consequently I don't feel like spending the rest of the evening putting a long post together but equally I don't want to think of anything else and I already have the screenshots, so...

Boy, that's really selling it...

Here's a typical page from the newly revised in-game Encyclopedia. It's clear, concise, detailed and very easy to understand. I think it would be fair to say that most players, having taken the trouble to read it, would know just what to look for when a quest told them to go find a totem and just what to do about it when they found one.

In my original run in Chimeraland I never got the hang of totems. They didn't seem very consistent and I couldn't always figure out which ones I needed or why some didn't seem to do anything. I did read the Encyclopedia page but I don't recall that it made much sense.

If I found totems confusing, I found faction incomprehensible. You have to make a choice at character creation but there's no real explanation of what that choice means or why you'd pick one over another, except for the information about resources.

That carries over to the new version, above, which again is from the Encyclopedia. I haven't yet revisited character creation to see if the description there has also been re-written. What you can now clearly understand is that these are PvP factions not, as I thought, NPC factions. When it says "There are three factions in Chimeraland and they are all enemies" it's telling you that you are only safe on your starting continent. Everywhere else you're going to get killed. By other players.

Just in case you missed the memo, here it is again, in even plainer language. Chimeraland is a PvP game. There is open PvP. As it tells you in another perfectly translated panel, which I forgot to screenshot, you're protected until Level 15 but then it's open season. Clearly, on your own continent you're far less likely to run into players from the other factions, which probably explains why I have so far never been attacked by anyone. I'm sure it'd be a different story if I tried to travel outside my Faction's borders. None of this was clear to me until now.

Here's the page on Fishing. Fishing in Chimeraland is very straightforward and very similar to fishing in many other mmorpgs so I had no trouble figuring it out on my own. There was a certain amount of trial and error all the same. I don't recall if I ever looked it up in the Encyclopedia but if I didn't it was because I already knew the information there would be so garbled it would probably leave me more confused than ever. Very much not the case any more.

Here's my favorite example so far. The rocket into space. Much play was made of this feature in the promotional material from the initial SEA launch. It made a big impression on me at the time because it emphasized the huge amount of XP you could get from riding the rocket. 

That, however, was about the sum of the information I was able to glean from the confusing description back then. One of the first things I did in the game was try to find the rocket but nothing really told me where to look. I did eventually find the spot but I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do there and after fiddling around for a while I gave up.

Reading this, it's hardly surprising. The original translation seemed to imply all you had to do was get to the rocket and everything else would happen automatically. In fact, it takes quite a lot of work to get the thing started and even then you have to crawl underneath the damn thng to set it off. It's clear enough now but it sure wasn't then. 

Finally, if only because it's the last screenshot I have, there's the question of all the re-translated quest dialog. Most of this was vaguely comprehensible the first time round but a lot of the finer detail was garbled. I generally got the gist of what Bella, Yenni and the others were trying to tell me but sometimes I just couldn't figure out exactly what they wanted me to do or where they wanted me to go and often I couldn't quite see how one thing connected to something else.

Now it's all beautifully articulated. I haven't been in any doubt about what to do or why I need to do it. What's more, the conversation has a reasonably natural flow, which makes the whole thing feel a lot less like being lectured by an immigration officer and a lot more like being mentored by... well, a mentor.

I'd put up a couple of "Before" shots of the old quest or Encyclopedia text but unfortunately I didn't take any. I realize that means all of this is based on my memory of how it used to be, which is not what you'd call hard evidence but then this isn't a court of law. My impression is that the whole game has been completely and comprehensively re-translated and that whoever did the job did it well.

The question is, does that make the game more or less enjoyable and the answer's not as obvious as you might imagine. It ought to be clear from the many posts I wrote about Chimeraland during my first run that the sheer mystery of the whole thing was one of the key factors driving my engagement with it. 

I loved trying to figure out what was going on. It was like a really interesting puzzle. I got a great sense of satisfaction every time I learned more about how the game worked and it was always a moment when I realised I'd misunderstood something. 

Without that element of confusion, would I ever have become so enmeshed in the game and its world? Didn't the off-kilter translations add to the otherworldly feel of the place? Does it all seem a little more trite, a little less original, now everything's spelled out in good, plain English?

It's very hard to say because with the changes I have the added hook of being able to compare one experience with the other, something that, as this post demonstrates, plays very well with my personal proclivities. I do like to compare and contrast.

Noah's Heart makes a great counterpoint to this argument. The in-game explanations of systems and mechanics, by contrast, are generally clear enough. They could certainly do with some tidying up here and there but a complete re-write wouldn't add that much. There's not a huge amount of enjoyable puzzle-solving to be had by figuring them out so nothing major would be lost with a better gloss. 

Even so, Archosaur should very definitely take a leaf out of Chimeraland's book and get someone to do a proper, accurate, demotic English translation of all the text in the game.That's because Noah's Heart is far more narrative-heavy than Chimeraland. It has reams of story text and dialog, none of which reads well and most of which reads very badly indeed. I would actually pay a modest amount for DLC that rendered the storyline into normal English.

The current  translation varies from barely adequate to barely comprehensible. What that game needs more than anything else, if it ever hopes to be really successful in the West, is the exact same kind of re-translation Chimeraland just received.

I say that with some conviction because I believe players who actually find working stuff out for themselves in mmorpgs make up a fairly small percentage of the playerbase. The demographic that enjoys trying to make sense of badly translated in-game text as a game in itself has to be vanishingly small.

Cheaping out on translation seems to be the norm in imported games and I can't help but think it's one of the reasons so many fail to make much of an impact. Not only are poor translations off-putting to natural English speakers, they have to make playing the game even harder for players trying to pick their way through the explanations using English as a second or third language.

I think on balance even I would prefer solid translations to the dubious thrill of trying to figure out what the original meaning was before it was mangled by a monolingual intern using Google Translate. Chimeraland might not have have seemed quite so bizarre with easy-to-follow instructions but I think it would still have been quite bizarre enough. It is an odd game, after all.

The new translation also gives me an added incentive to carry on playing now I've returned. It doesn't feel quite like walking the exact same path, even though it really is. Things feel just different enough, thanks to the extra clarity, that I might want to get at least as far as I did last time, just to see if there was anything I missed because I couldn't work out what some NPC was trying to say.

I'm pretty sure that must have happened a lot.

Lost In Translation: Following The Plot In Noah's Heart

There's only one reason I wish Noah's Heart was on Steam right now and that's so I could tell you just how many hours I've put in. I honestly have no idea but it has to be a lot. 

At some point I'm hoping I'll be able to say I know what I'm doing but right now that moment seems a long way off. One thing I can say is that I'm having a lot of fun. There's very little about the game I've seen that I don't like. I like the way it looks, the way it plays and the way it sounds. I even like the story.

About the only thing I don't like is the translation.

It's not terrible. I've seen much worse. I've played imported mmorpgs where the localization was so poorly done I could barely understand what the questgivers wanted, let alone follow the nuances of the backstory. That's never the case in Noah's Heart but somehow it almost makes things worse.

What irks me about the way the translation has been handled is how it offers just enough to suggest both the story and the telling were likely much more entertaining in the original version. There's a lot of plot and even more lore and it seems like it would all add up to quite a rich and detailed background, if only it was easier to follow.

As for the dialog, it's all too easy to see where the humorous asides, ironic comments and snarky backchat would go in a naturalistic, idiomatic version. I'd lay odds it's genuinely witty in the original language, which I assume would be either Mandarin or Cantonese, since the developer, Archosaur Games, is based in Beijing.

That's ironic even in the translation. I imagine it was very dry indeed in the original.

 

The game launched with an impressive five language choices: Thai, English, Chinese, Vietnamese and Bahasa. I had to look the last one up. It's "a form of Malay, spoken in Indonesia." I wonder if the other South-East Asian translations are better than the English? I hope so for the sake of the players using them but I guess there's no particular reason why they should be. An English game localized into Dutch wouldn't necessarily get all the nuances right just because the two countries are geographically adjacent and share a language group.

A bad translation doesn't put me off if the gameplay is good, anyway. One of my favorite imported titles of all time, Dragon Nest, is barely comprehensible at times but it's beautiful to look at at and wildly entertaining to play so I put up with the clunky dialog.

Noah's Heart is another game where I really wish someone had done a better job with the translation, all the same. While it might be fair to characterise a lot of SE Asian mmorpgs, particularly the anime ones, as having a certain, generic similarity when it comes to plot, I've found the narratives of many of the ones I've played to be more involving than some of their Western counterparts. 

It's hokum, sure, but it's often pacey, zippy, lively hokum that doesn't take itself too seriously. Western fantasy all too often tends to adopt a portentous, overblown style that refers back to a whole tradition I neither respect nor admire. I'd rather run around with a gang of emotional, excitable kids than trudge along with some grim hero carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Everyone we meet seems to have some kind of history with Hughes.

 

It doesn't help that I can't even work out what the central narrative of Noah's Heart is. There's a main storyline I've been following that involves Hughes and his organization, Gale Force, who also turn up in the other narratives, but I really couldn't begin to tell you what it's about.

There's a good reason for that: I haven't touched the main storyline for ages. Instead, I've been investigating a serial killer in Gulf Stream City and trying to find a missing scientist, who's been abducted by terrorists. 

Those are the two, entirely separate and unconnected (Or are they?) plots of Season Zero - Light and Shadow and Season One - Scarlet Mark Mystery. I didn't even realise there were seasons until the second one, confusingly numbered #1, turned up but fortunately you can go back and play catch-up, which is how I came to be doing them both at the same time. 

I'm going to have to get a move on with my investigations, too. As I type this, the game is down for an update, after which it seems we'll have not just a whole new zone, the Olmec Rainforest, but yet another Season, "Soul Inspired Art". As with just about everything else in the game, there's no real introduction or explanation. New things just appear, it seems like every day. If there's one thing Noah's Heart isn't short of it's content.

Ave comes clean about who she really is. There's so much lore. I wish there was a guide.

I've been thundering through the twin stories as fast as the mechanics will allow. There's a time-gated element, as I mentioned in a previous post, where you have to accrue various clues by doing unrelated dailies for story points but because I have two tales on the go at once I've been able to stagger my progress so one or the other is always in play. That's going to get even easier with a third season, always assuming one of the others doesn't vanish before I've finished it.

I hope not. I want to find out how the stories end. As the screenshot at the top of the post shows, I'm close to finishing Season Zero and almost half way through Season One. It's taking a while. They're really long, not least because of the recursive format they both employ.

In order to progress you need to make mistakes. At every nodal point in the narrative - and there are many - you're faced with a binary choice, only one option of which is available. You can see there is another but you don't have sufficient information to take it. 

The way you get that information is by taking the only available option and failing. Sometimes you die, sometimes everyone dies. Sometimes you accuse an innocent suspect and get them killed. Sometimes you just make a fool of yourself. 

Proof that not everyone in Noah is seventeen years old. Or even looks like they are.

Whatever happens, things don't work out and you have to go back a stage. Time literally resets. You click an icon on screen and there's a montage flashback in reverse, spooling you back to the bad decision you made. Then you get to do it again, making a diferent choice by using what you learned from getting it wrong.

I really like that. It confused the heck out of me to begin with but now I understand it I'm fascinated to see the alternate realities my reckless choices create. And sometimes the fail states involve huge chunks of playable content you really wouldn't want to miss.

To get to the correct result, I think I saw the spectacular air raid on Darkmist Citadel five times and the best action sequence that followed it was one of the failures. That one involved a crazy car chase, a bunch of exciting fights, a desperate race to a waiting galleon for a daring escape by sea and finally a terrible storm in which the ship went down with all hands. 

Coming from a Western mmorpg like Guild Wars 2, where you're expected to make do with a couple of hours of new story every three months or so, the sheer amount of narrative and non-repeatable gameplay involved in these Seasons is mindblowing. Any one of them would keep ANet going for half a year and we'll have had three in a month!

Tell me about it!

If only someone had taken the trouble to hire a native English speaker to turn the literal translations into the kind of language people actually speak, everything would be perfect. Any passing American or Australian student on a gap year would have done. Archosaur could have crowdsourced it, even. It's a certainty there are people playing the game who could do a better job. Probably hundreds of them 

I do think companies hoping to go big in the West are missing a trick when it comes to translations. There's often a big hoo-hah about localized gameplay or costume or gender options (Rightly so.) but there seems to be some kind of assumption that Google Translate is good enough when it comes to the written word.

It's a pity. I know the conventional wisdom is that no-one reads quest text but not reading it isn't the same as not seeing it. A bad translation probably creates more of a bad impression than you'd think.

Then again, as I say, it hasn't put me off. I just know someone, somewhere is getting all the subtleties I'm missing. It's annoying, but what can you do?

The Ghost Of Henry James

There are times when I can see the value of Twitter. Little things pop up all the time, none of them worth a long discussion but all too weird, worrying or just plain funny to leave alone. A quick couple of sentences, a picture, a link would do it. Just what Twitter was made for.

Things like this, for example. I mean, it's not something I'd normally get into. I'm not a big Final Fantasy fan. I've played three titles in the series: VII, XI and XIV. There's no chance I'm going to play the upcoming XVI so why would I mention it at all?

Well, because these days, when Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yakuda makes a pronouncement, it has the potential to unbalance equilibrium across the entire mmorpg gamespace. He's not just the producer of the latest instalment of the long-running franchise, he's also the much-revered savior and showrunner of Final Fantasy XIV, arguably now the pre-eminent mmorpg in the West and certainly one of the most influential. People listen when he speaks and not just fans.

I'm already on record as not being a Yoshi-P cultist. I've always found him to be a difficult figure, my wariness going all the way back to the FFXIV: A Realm Reborn relaunch, when he consistently made statements I found to be uncomfortably paternalistic and patronising. 

I still have issues with a good deal of what he says although I am now willing to ascribe some of that to cultural and language differences, some to issues of my own. I broadly approve of much of what he's actually done with FFXIV. It tends to be more the way he talks about it that sets my teeth on edge.

In this case, though, my reaction was more a dumbfounded "Wha...?" Judge for yourself:

"Yoshida stated that the motion capture and voice acting are all done by Europeans. He went on to say that they purposely did not include any American accents in the game. “However, even though the script is written in English, we made sure not to include any American accents. We decided to do this to prevent Americans from playing the game and getting mad by saying something like, “I was looking forward to playing a game set in fantasy medieval Europe, but why are they speaking American English?” To prevent this, we made sure all dialogue was recorded using British English.” "

Unpack that, if you can. 

Maybe some American of my readers can add a gloss. Do people in the States really find hearing an accent similar to their own in a video game set somewhere other than the USA disappointing or confusing? I would have thought it was so universal an experience as to be entirely unremarkable. And even if it's true, is a British accent somehow more acceptable, even when it's no more appropriate to the setting?

Seriously, there's so much going on here it's hard to get your head around it. At the most basic level, none of the characters in the proposed setting are going to be speaking any kind of recognizeable English to begin with so why are we even giving the accent consideration? 

You might want to argue that, as is routinely the case in movies,various moderrn accents could stand in for contemorary ones but this is "medieval Europe" we're talking about, a place and time where people would have been speaking in dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of languages and dialects, almost all incoprehensible nowadays to anyone other than a scholar of the period. How can it possibly add authenticity, even spurious, fictional authenticity, to have every one of them speaking "British English", whatever that even is?

What's more, it's not even the historical Europe. It's "fantasy Medieval Europe". There will, one imagines, be magic and non-human races at the very least. Even if anyone was worried about linguistic authenticity in the first place, something that seems exceedingly unlikely, those concerns are going to crumble into irrelevance the first time an elf or a goblin opens their mouth.

My strong feeling is that it's a made-up problem to begin with but even if Yoshi-P has demographic research or metrics from previous Final Fantasy games to back up his belief that Americans get mad if they hear their own accents in medieval fantasy games, it's really the assumption that using "British English" is somehow going to fix all this that floors me. 

I'm going to take it that a century of jobbing British actors prostituting their accents in Hollywood, aided and abetted by a seemingly endless stream of artistically dubious but commercially successful television series exploiting the supposed nostalgic charm of a rigid and hierarchical class structure have somehow conspired to imprint a particular set of aural tropes, now conveniently labelled "British English" on the rest of the world.

I can understand, albeit with some embarassment, how such expedient choices have led the world to believe Britain is nothing more than a Victorian\Edwardian theme park, held in perpetual temporal stasis for their entertainment, but how and when did the elongated dipthongs of a public school educated, drama school trained, upper-middle class voice or the dropped consonants and glottal stops that pass for working-class diction come to represent the authentic sound of "medieval Europe?"

All I can say is that I hope Yoshi-P has thought this through. Even if he's right about American sensitivities, something I very much doubt, has he given due consideration to the sensibilities of his European customers? How do they feel about British accents? Do they prefer them to American ones? Are they "looking forward to a game set in medieval Europe" where every cut-scene sounds like an out-take from Downton Abbey?

I suppose there's a chance French and German speakers may get their own localized versions but there are more than forty countries in Europe and hardly any of them have English as a first language, British or American. As for we Brits, I suspect most would be fine with a mix that included some regional American accents. It would certainlybe preferable to some of the supposed "celtic fringe" tones all too often assigned to the shorter fantasy races.

It's hard to see this idiosyncratic solution suiting anyone other than, perhaps, Yoshi-P's home audience, who might, for all I know, find British accents more authentic to the period and the setting than American. But won't there be a Japanese-voiced version for the home market, anyway?

All of that and I haven't even touched on the even weirder revelation that all the motion capture work has also been assigned to European actors. Americans apparently can't even get the fantasy medieval European moves right.

And... that was eleven hundred words. I guess Twitter wouldn't have helped after all.

Bless Online : First Impressions, Part Two

I played Bless for another, longish session last night. Steam tells me I've put ten hours into the game. My Mascu ranger is level 14. I know just enough about the game to be dangerous. Let's go!

The Tutorial

I am not a big fan of Tutorials. I particularly dislike it when they make you finish an entire instance that has nothing to do with the game itself - especially when it takes up most of your first hour, draining any excitement and interest you ever had and making you wish you'd never bothered. Looking at you, Rift.

Bless kind of has one one of those but it doesn't really count because it's so incredibly short. There's an airship trip. I can't even remember how it starts. Almost immediately it's interrupted by a crisis. A beetle attack. (Beetles? Really??) There's a fight which goes by in a blur and then we're docking and that's it. All over.

It's reminiscent of the original opening to FFXIV (go figure) but on fast-forward. It also reminded me of EQ2 as well as several other MMOs I've played. Originality isn't an issue here, that's for sure.

Making the threat a horde of flying beetles does set the tone for what comes next, inasmuch as it's low key and slightly strange. Once the airship lands the rest of the tutorial melds seamlessly into the game proper. You begin doing the kind of things you're going to go on doing, only with hints, prompts and treats when you do it right. It's well-paced, helpful and unobrtusive. I appreciated it.

Questing and Story

Bless Online is a themepark. No question about that. But it's an odd, off-kilter kind of themepark, not the straight-up, quest hub WoW-clone kind.

There's a Main Quest sequence and a smorgasbord of side-quests. The questgivers have exclamation points over their heads but they're understated and easy to miss. The non-narrative questgivers are scattered all over the place, not gathered in little clumps. There's something of an old-school feel, although thankfully you don't have to hail every NPC just to check if they want something.

I was rather taken with the early questing. It's unusual. The first quest I got had me joining some NPC organization, whereupon they sent me to choose the new uniform for the guild. I went to see a tailor, who showed me several options hanging on mannequins. I had to select the most suitable. The reward was a uniform of my own.

After that I was interviewed by the guild leader and given a mission that sent me to investigate some trouble in the sewage treatment plant. There was some banter about that. I found it amusing. Almost as soon as I got there an animated suit of armor popped out of the waste-water and battle commenced.

From there things escalated to a show-down with a mad scientist who was sticking giant rats into plate armor for some unexplained reason. That led to his lab getting wrecked and somehow it was my fault and I found myself owing damages to the city, which is how I ended up working for the Government.

Or something like that. To be honest, it was all a bit of a blur. It was also entertaining and absorbing, two words that describe all the questing I've done so far.

That was all part of the main questline. I think. There's a very good quest journal with onscreen prompts and a detailed summary but mostly I've just been trucking along, enjoying myself, not worrying too much about the structure.

The plot has some twists I didn't expect and a narrative I'm finding quite interesting. It's linear without being pedestrian and familiar without being enirely predictable. I do tend to enjoy the questing in Eastern MMOs more than that in Western ones, though, so factor that in.

Also, I've read that there's an entirely different main quest and starting area for each race. If that's true it adds a very significant degree of replayability to the low-end game. I'd definitely play through a few more like this one.

Translations, Voice Acting and Polish

I put this in as a separate category because it's been a big part of the backlash. There are long, angry threads on Reddit bemoaning the awfulness of the translation and the bugginess of the game. There are also white knight defences of the work NeoWiz has put in to change all that.

My experience has been mixed. The very early part of the game is well translated. The quest dialog is idiomatic and lucid. The game instructions are coherent and grammatically correct. There are very few spelling errors and little that seems off or odd. I was impressed.

Unfortunately, that level of quality doesn't last. By around level ten or so the quest dialog reverts to the kind of quasi-English all-too familiar from many other hastily localized MMOs. At no point does it become difficult to follow but the characters start sounding less like individuals with personality and more like print-outs from Google Translate. Which is most likely what they are.

That doesn't always apply when it comes to the main quest. There, at least on the sequences that are voiced, things continue to be fully translated by someone with a sound grasp of spoken English.

The voiceovers themselves are all done by people who at least sound as though they're speaking their mother-tongue. Not all of them sound like their day job is acting but some of them are quite convincing. I've heard a lot worse.

As for bugs, I haven't run into any at all. For Early Access Bless seems solid, at least at the levels I'm playing.
 

Mounts and Taming

Another Eastern feature I strongly favor is auto-questing. I love being able to click a button and have my character find her own way to the next NPC or location. It seems to me to add immersion rather than remove it. My character should know her way around better than me. She lives there. I don't.

The auto-pathing in Bless is good, except where it doesn't play nice with things like the paternoster lifts. I found myself running into a corner a few times when the lift platform was up not down. Also I ran off a few high terraces once in a while. Health and safety isn't much of a thing here. Fortunately neither is falling damage. I guess if you can drop a hundred feet then get up and walk away you might as well save money on railings.

Somewhere along the questline they gave me a horse. Quite early on. I think I was maybe level five or six. He's a bit on the skinny side. You can see his ribs. Still, a ride's a ride.

It's definitely faster on horseback but mounts have a stamina pool and it depletes. Slowly, because I didn't notice for a long time, but eventually, on a long cross-country canter, my horse up and vanished.

There's a whole feeding system for mounts. They level up and acquire skills. There are  ground and flying mounts and mounts are a sub-class of Companions, which also includes Pets, which you tame. You can have up to forty Companions. That's about as much as I know but I'm guessing it's a significant part of the game.

So far I have two Companions and I was pointed to both of them by the extended tutorial (still popping up hints and quests at level 14). To go with my under-nourished horse I have a hamster the size of a Pomeranian.

I tamed the hamster using a taming scroll. Actually, four training scrolls. Taming is a mini-game where you have to stop a moving cursor as it passes across a green line. It's not hard but it's not a gimme.

I imagine it gets a lot harder as you go for bigger animals but that's just speculation. I tried to tame a giant rabbit (that's us, hanging out, in the picture above) but I didn't have the right scroll for it. So far I only have the hamster. He doesn't appear to do anything except follow me but he does level up. A cosmetic pet with levels is a new one on me. I may be missing something here.

Leveling

It's easy. And fast. So far.

Killing mobs and gathering materials both give xp to the same leveling pool but the amounts are relatively small. The huge bulk of xp comes from quests. The main quest sequence doesn't give enough xp alone to hit its own gates but so far I've not really needed to supplement my quest xp to keep pace with the requirements. I did hit a couple of markers a tad early but a few side quests fixed that.

I read a couple of leveling guides, not because I was having any issues but because I'd heard that Bless can be very grindy and I wasn't seeing it yet. The guides tend to be written by and for people who want to skip as much content as possible as they race to the endgame. It was much the same in BDO. I don't believe anyone who enjoys questing and exploring is going to find the low levels in any the Eastern MMOs too much of a grind.

If anything, leveling may be a little fast for my tastes. I'm not keen to hit 30, at which point we move into open PvP zones with questing shared by the opposing factions (the exact same model as Allods, come to think of it). I already have an unavoidable xp buff granted by the game and some xp potions from a quest, which are staying in my pack. I don't foresee any difficulties in getting to thirty. After that... we'll see.

As well as quests Bless also has Monster Books. Sadly, these are not twenty-foot tall tomes with giant wheels. They're kill quests for specific creatures, familiar from many other games, most obviously FFXIV (Surprise!).

It's impossible to avoid these because, well, you have to kill stuff. I haven't focused on any yet but it's good to see them ticking away in the background.

Gear and Loot

This is a strange one. Before I'd even received a single piece of gear from a quest I happened to browse the wares of an NPC merchant. She had full sets of armor, with stats, for every class. More surprising yet, it was all cheap enough that I could afford it, just with the coin I'd been looting off regular kills. So I bought a complete outfit.

That significantly upgraded my gear score (which is an actual stat you can see on your paper doll). I was very happy, if a little puzzled. I can't think of many MMOs where you can just buy all the gear you need, for pennies, from an NPC.

It got even odder when, almost immediately afterwards, I received my first piece of gear as a quest reward. It was literally identical to one of the pieces I'd just bought, except it had a diferent name.

This is how armor works, it appears. The system was confirmed when I hit my first Dungeon in the main quest sequence. It's gated both by level (13) and gear score (1665). At 13 was well under the bar but there's an armor vendor right outside the dungeon entrance. I bought a new set of gear from her for peanuts and boom! In I went.

It seems like an odd system but only because it's just the baseline. You can be assured of functional armor but you're going to want a lot better than just functional.

For that you need to upgrade. There's one of those systems that lets you salvage unwanted gear for a resource you can use to improve items you want to use. Armor can also be crafted, as can accessories like Jewellery. I'm just at the tip of that iceberg so I can't say much more about it, except that if it follows the pattern of most imported MMOs it will be a spiral of ever-increasing costs for ever-diminishing returns. That's where the real grind usually lies.

Then there are your all-important weapons. Vendors don't sell those. They come as drops from mobs or from questing. I'm unclear whether they can be crafted. You can also buy them on the auction house. Boss mobs in dungeons always drop either gear or weapons. Other mobs have a much lower chance but can still drop useful stuff.

That is my preferred loot system and always has been. Hunt stuff, use what it drops. Can't improve on perfection. Add a vendor that has you covered for the basics and a way to recycle all the Paladin and Assassin stuff you're never going to give to an alt and you're in a sweet spot. All we really need from there is for some stuff to have unusual and exciting procs and we're home free.



Dungeons

Oh, no. Not yet. I've seen my first one and it didn't go well.

Dungeons in the context of Bless, as in many Eastern MMOs, mainly means solo instances. As mentioned above, they have entry requirements, which you can find here.

I had no difficulty with the regular mobs in the first dungeon, the Underground Prison of Balmont. They dropped some weapons for me, too, albeit not ones I could use.

The fun ended when I tried the first boss. I did get him to 50% but it was clear I'd need a few more levels to finish him and since the gate to the rest of the dungeon doesn't open until he dies I've bookmarked him for another try at Level 15.



Crafting

I have even less to say about this than I do about Dungeons. At level 14 I got the prompt to visit the craft mats vendor. There, I got to pick a Main Profession and a Sub.

After some consideration I realized I had no clue what to choose. Rather than do any out-of-game research I just picked the ones I fancied, which happened to be Handicraft and Cooking. Handicraft makes accessories and cooking, as well as the obvious, makes stamina recovery items for mounts.

The mats lady then sent me to see the workshop guy and I used his workbench to make a bar of silver. It's the standard "have items in your inventory, hit button, watch progress bar" deal. Nothing fancy.

And that's as much as I know. Oh, except for the odd quirk that recipes, as well as being auto-granted by level, are found in "Dwarven Chests" that pop up around the world, both outdoors and in dungeons. By luck I'd already run into one of these under a bridge somewhere. Unfortunately the recipe I got was for Tailors. Still, it's a nice idea.

Conclusion

So far, so good. I'm enjoying myself. What's more, when I'm doing my dailies in GW2 I'm thinking about Bless and hankering to get back to it. I like my character, the world, the questing, the story and the games systems I've seen so far.

On the other hand, I could say the same for a whole raft of MMOS imported from Korea, China and Japan. Black Desert, Blade and Soul, Revelation Online, Twin Saga... I've really enjoyed all of them. They're all just different enough from each other that it feels a little bit fresh every time, yet familiar enough now that it feels comfortable.

I don't think there's much chance I'll ever play any of these games to the level cap, let alone go on after that. At low to mid level though, I find they all pass the time very pleasantly and have a good deal to recommend them.

Bless is in no way going to change anyone's mind about anything. If you didn't like previous Korean MMOs you're not going to like this one. If you did, you might well find Bless a little lackluster. It doesn't even pretend to be original and in Early Access it lacks some polish.

If you're easily amused, like me, though, it's definitely worth giving Bless a go. I'm sure there are a good few more hours in it for me and the odd blog post, too.

What more can you expect for a tenner?