AQ3D Has A New Introduction. I Thought I'd Play It. So I did. Except I Didn't.

Artix Entertainment, developer of AdventureQuest 3D, sent me an interesting email at the weekend, with a shortened version of this news item on the website. The game will be ten years old in October and in common with almost all ageing MMORPGs it's finding recruitment difficult. 

Unlike some developers, finding themselves in a similar predicament, however, Artix is perfectly happy to explain the problem in painfully honest terms. Plenty of devs for other games have given interviews over the years complaining how hard it is to get anyone even to complete a tutorial, much less carry on for a while to find out what their game is really about but few have gone on to lay out just what that failure to engage with new customers means for the future of the game as a whole.

"Low completion rates directly affect AQ3D’s ability to promote the game, grow the team, and fund updates."

I mean, it is obvious but how often does anyone come right out and say it? The full news item goes into much more detail, complete with percentages. It's an informative read.

As usual, the problem is deemed to be the Intro. It's always either the Intro or the Tutorial, often but not always one and the same thing, that gets the blame. 

Some games never stop tinkering with the way the game attempts to introduce itself to new players. Wilhelm has written about EVE doing just that and CCP is certainly one of the companies more willing to talk about the problem. Other games, like Guild Wars 2, have quite possibly never changed the introduction since the game was launched. If they changed it in the ten years I was playing, I can't remember it happening.

Most developers probably take a couple of swings and then give it up as a lost cause, which is almost certainly the sensible choice. I suspect the truly honest explanation for the problem, the one few devs will ever admit to, is that new players just don't want to start playing old games. 

It seems as if gamers love to go on playing old games they already play, to the point that getting people to try anything new at all is becoming something of a problem for the MMO genre, if not the gaming industry. They can be cajoled to go back and play games they used to play, too, and a really hot new title can bring gamers on board by the millions. 

Getting people to start playing a game that came out years ago and then keep playing it, though? Yeah, that's not going to happen. Not very often.

Still, you have to try, don't you? Or so some devs believe and Artix would appear to be one of them. Complaining voices on the Steam Discussion pages suggest, this is at least the fourth time they've remade the Intro, possibly the fifth or sixth. I'm hardly a regular player but even I can remember playing through three very different previous versions, all of which are probably reviewed somewhere on this blog, so I can confirm this has to be #4 at the lowest count.

I was curious to see what they'd changed so I played through the whole thing last night and this morning.

Or I thought I did...

I couldn't see any links to the new Intro in either the email or on the website, so I logged into Steam, opened the game and made a new character. Then I played through the Intro and Tutorial I got, which was certainly new to me. It took me just over eighty minutes, last night and this morning. When I'd finished, I came here and wrote the following post. 

I'll tell you now: this is not a review of the New Intro. 

 

The first thing I'd say about is that it's long. According to Steam it took me over 80 minutes. It didn't feel quite that long because it's all action. The email says 

"This intro focuses on less friction, more action, fewer systems at once, and a smoother onboarding experience"

It also explains the new version is

 "Designed for New Players (Not Veterans)" 

 because 

 "Longtime players may find things obvious, but new players often feel overwhelmed or confused" 

My feeling is that players new only to AQ3D, not the MMORPG genre itself, will find it about as confusing as they do any new game of its kind, no more and no less, while players new to the genre itself will be mostly baffled. I must have played through literally hundreds of similar introductions and tutorials and I found myself puzzling over what to do or where to go next at least half a dozen times.

It must be close to impossible to remove all sources of confusion from something like this. The new Intro makes an attempt to guide the player through every interaction, using on-screen pointers and arrows but I had a few minor issues where the way the arrows seemed to be leading was through a solid wall or when there didn't seem to be an obvious indication of which button to press next. 

There were also numerous messages concerning non-tutorial systems like Daily Tasks that wouldn't have made a lot of sense to a real new player and I spotted several spelling errors in the text but as the email is keen to make clear

"This intro is a fast-built concept, not a fully polished final product."

The idea is that current players will run through the new introduction and tutorial and give feedback by way of an in-game survey. I finished the whole thing but no survey popped. Maybe it's not ready yet.

There certainly needs to be some kind of formal finish to the whole thing because at the moment by far the most confusing aspect is the very end. After more than an hour of close guidance and tight hand-holding, the Introduction ends with a portal that dumps the player onto the flagstones of the game's hub city, Battleon, at which point all assistance just... stops.

I looked around for a continuation of the quest I'd been on, someone who might explain what just happened, but there was no-one. Just the regular NPCs and questgivers who always hang around, touting for custom. I checked my quest journal and there was nothing there either. Since no survey appeared, I logged out and came to write this post instead.

While there certainly needs to be a smoother transition into the game itself, I guess it's fair to assume that any new player who's made it through more than an hour of instruction and adventure to get this far is more likely then not to go and have a look around, take some of the available quests and even start playing the game in the regular fashion. 

To that extent it would already have overcome one of the biggest problems with the previous Intro, which was that

"...most newbies dropped off before reaching Battleon."

On the other hand, the gameplay of AQ3D itself is very different from the gameplay of the new Introduction. The Intro is a tightly scripted, linear adventure with lots of action and some quite striking set piece events. The game that follows is a very typical, old-school MMORPG, in which the player is expected to concentrate on gear, levels and any number of progression systems.

It's also much slower. To play through the new Intro I had to make a fresh character. By the end of it, that character was two levels higher than my regular character. When she fell out of the portal into Battleon she was already level 14. 

I get that the idea is to make the game seem exciting. Something is happening all the time in the Intro. There are pop-ups and flashes and messages telling you about your stats and how you're getting more and more powerful. You get a full set of gear, a weapon and a horse.

There's also a solid, if extremely unoriginal story. Seriously, how many games have a "Void" that's threatening to annihilate existence? Sometimes it seems like all of them. But unoriginal though it may be, the story trucks along and holds the interest well enough.

The  problem with all of that is that it could easily set up unreasonable expectations in someone unfamiliar with the genre. An hour of non-stop excitement, action and dopamine hits and then everything goes into what feels, by contrast, like extreme slow motion.

There are only a handful of comments so far on the Steam discussion forum but all of them make much the same point: another new Introduction is a waste of resources because there's little or no chance new players will come into the game no matter how good it is. Instead, efforts should be focused on getting former players to come back.

And that is indeed how many of the more successful older MMORPGs have been handling things for years. After a certain point, the pool of ex-players vastly outnumbers any realistic expectations for potential newcomers and former players really should be a lot easier to reach with marketing and promotions. After all, presumably they liked the game once. Maybe all they need is a reminder of how much.

As for the new Introduction itself, I think it's definitely the best so far, although that isn't saying all that much. The first two were pretty bad. The one this replaces was a lot better but the latest one really zips along. I enjoyed playing it even if it did just seem to come to a sudden, unsatisfying halt just when it was getting interesting.

Will it make any difference to the onboarding issue? Not a chance. I'd be willing to bet the problem is rarely that new players can't understand what to do. It's that they can understand it all too well and don't want anything more to do with it.

Instead of trying to get new players interested in their decade-old game, maybe Artix out to be working on a new one. Failing that, they probably need some kind of Classic or Retro server option, some way to milk the nostalgia market and bring back some of the players who've drifted away.

That, of course, is easier said than done, as many other developers have discovered to their cost, but it probably makes more sense than spending scarce resources on yet another Intro and Tutorial."

 

All of which turns out to be moot because I was, in fact, playing the OLD Intro. Or, rather, the old-new Intro, one I'd never played before because they did indeed make yet another Intro between the real new one and the last one I did play, which I reviewed here five years ago. 

Since I can't figure out how to access the real new Intro without making a whole, new account and since I also don't want to spend any more time on it today, that's going to have to stand as a review of the old one, which is apparently still in play. Good to get that on record I guess, even if all the inferences and conclusions I drew are wrong.

As soon as I can get a hands-on with the real New Intro, I'll be able to make a true comparison and maybe come to some different conclusions.

For today, though, that's all I'm doing!

Four Years Later: AQ3D

According to Steam, the last time I played AdventureQuest 3D was back in 2016. It was also the last time I wrote about it here.

That's perhaps surprising, given the highly complimentary things I had to say about the game. It was in beta back then but I was already impressed. I liked the combat animations ("fluid and satisfying") and the UI (slick and extremely easy to use").

The overall feel of the game, particularly the writing, appealed to me: ("The whole game has an off-kilter, meta feel to it, a kind of post-post-modern sub-ironic knowing-yet-innocent stance that reminds me somewhat of Project: Gorgon."). I concluded my First Impressions piece, saying "I enjoyed it" and promising to "play more and write more."

That promise was, technically, kept when I posted about the game again a couple of weeks later. By then I had identified what appeared to be a problem, : "...the extreme dichotomy between what the game looks like it's going to be and what it is. It looks like a cheerful, cartoon-colorful knockabout MMO aimed at a younger-than-average audience. You come to it expecting a light-hearted, unchallenging romp and you get something that plays like EQ circa 1999. Only more so."

Back then, AQ3D had one of the most ferocious xp curves I'd ever encountered at the starting levels of an MMORPG. It took me two hours to get - barely - to level three. The game was also hard. I died many times on that epic journey from character creation to the starting zone.

Still, I was optimistic: "It has a great feel, tons of personality, huge potential... there's nothing very much wrong here that can't be fixed with some tuning, tweaking and a general reality check". My feeling was it needed a little longer in the oven: "The game probably could use at least the rest of the year in Closed Beta".

I think, back in 2016, we hadn't fully acclimatized to online gaming's new normal. I feared for the reviews if the game declared itself ready too soon. Four years later AQ3D is still in Early Access and my concerns that "Once it goes to Open Beta... that verdict could be as harsh on the game-makers as the game itself is on the players." appear hopelessly naive.

AQ3D currently enjoys a 76% "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam from over five thousand reviews. Its recent review rating is even better, 87% "Very Positive" from just under a hundred and fifty satisfied new customers.

I'm not surprised. This isn't the post I meant to write today. I had other plans. I'm writing this because somehow I ended up playing Adventure Quest 3D for much of the day.

I have the game bookmarked and I occasionally take a quick look to see what's new. I clicked on the link this morning, while I was waiting for something else to load, and I happened to see a news item about dungeons getting an auto-level feature, meaning they could be soloed. That sounded interesting and I'd been meaning to take another look at the game for... well, for years.

I dug up my old login details, patched up (it took about a minute and a half - Steam has been dutifully updating everything even though I never play), and logged in my one and only character, a level three warrior.

I clearly remember logging out four years ago in the main hub city, Battleon but the game wasn't having any of that. There's a new tutorial, it seems, vastly improved over the one I nitpicked back in closed beta, and I wasn't going to be allowed to skip it.

The new tutorial is every bit as peculiar as the original but infinitely slicker and far more amusing, featuring a personification of Death that owes no small debt to Terry Pratchett. I thought that was a fine idea, not because it's clever or original, which it profoundly is not, but because if you don't like pop culture references, pastiches and parodies this is very much not the game for you. It's best you see what you're letting yourself in for up front so you can bail if you don't like it.

From then onwards the gameplay is remarkably similar to how I remember it from four years ago, only now everything's on castors. If I had to pick one word it would be "slick".

The flow is just about perfect. So perfect, in fact, that when I thought to tab out and check the time so I could start on this post, I fouind I'd lost nearly two hours of my life. I thought I'd been playing for about ninety minutes. It had actually been three and a half hours. There's never really a moment when things stop. Everything leads into something else but it never feels forced or rushed.

Artix seem to have performed some kind of minor miracle on the xp curve. Looked at objectively it's still fairly slow by modern-day standards. In over three hours of continuous play, during which I was questing, killing and receiving experience non-stop, my character managed to progress from level three to level six.

That's not much in the way of progress but she did do it twice. There are regular levels and then there are class ranks. I started as a Level three character with Rank three in Warrior and ended rated six in both. The xp bars for each start in the middle of the screen and progress outwards to the left and right, which is a trick I've never seen before. I don't know if they fill out equally or at the same rate or from the same source. I was having too much fun to notice.

The thing is, it doesn't feel slow. Not at all. The sense of grind I remember from beta is gone. Time to kill is measured in seconds. A few seconds. Kill quests only ask for five or eight mobs. Mobs that drop quest items drop them every time. There's a quest tracker and a directional pointer so you can get to where you need to be without delay.

Gear rains down, although a lot of it is the same, over and over. I got several upgrades. Everything displays, too, so it's a perpetual fashion show. Crafting options appear early and seem useful. There's a linear storyline quest but also plenty of sidebars. Not just NPCs with problems for you to solve or the inevitable mission board but oddities in the landscape that lead into mini-dungeons or boss fights.

The game looks good. A little hypersaturated but I like that. It's cartoony in a brash way and someone is far, far too fond of the color orange. Nevertheless, Lore (that's the name of the world, because if AQ3D is anything, it's meta) feels like a place, somehow. It probably shouldn't but it does.

Since I spent so much longer playing than I planned this afternoon I'm going to cut this short. A first impressions of first impressions if you like. I can't see any reason why I wouldn't play more given how much fun I had but then I said something similar four years ago and look what happened.

I also said back then "My previous post on [AQ3D] drew fewer page views than just about anything I can remember writing; certainly fewer than any post this year". At the time the only people I'd heard mention the game were Syp and Kaozz. Syp still does post about it very occasionally. No-one else seems to remember it exists.

Anyone else want to admit to having played it? Or want to read about it? Not that I either need affirmation or take requests but it's always interesting to know.

Making Games Is Hard, Yo! : AQ3D, 9Lives

AdventureQuest 3D went into Open Beta while we were away. I popped in for just a few minutes last night to take a look. I found it quite different to how I'd left it.

My character was still there (no wipe) but she was back at the very beginning of the game. There was a new "tutorial", hosted by Zorbak, a sarcastic little...something, who self-identifies as "evil". He might be a rabbit. It's hard to tell.

He also claims to be AQ3D's "mascot". One thing that's immediately apparent in this new version that's been opened to the public is that this is going to be a much more self-consciously arch, even camp, MMO than I was expecting from my limited experiences in closed beta.

There's a post-modern, meta vibe hanging over the whole thing that I swear wasn't there before. NPCs openly discuss being in a game, often. A grandfather and his granddaughter raised a cheer when they saw me coming and then lost hope when they saw I was "very low level" and this while they were cowering in fear of their lives from a bunch of skeleton invaders.

At the same time there's a whole, traditional MMORPG plot going on, with the whole world being invaded by Dark Forces and you being the Last Hope. It's all a bit of a puzzle.

There are also a slew of new cut-scenes that work rather well. Quests offer a lot of dialog but no actual choice, which leads one NPC to wonder whether you can actually read or whether you might just be clicking, blindly, trying to get to the end. As I said, very, very meta...

Coming to the gameplay,  at first I thought the danger rating of the mobs had been toned down several notches; then I realized I was still Level 3 in a Level 1 area and I still had all my old Closed Beta gear. No wonder everything was dropping in a few hits.

I got as far as the first (only?) town, Battleon, where I camped for the night. Overall I thought the very early stages gave a much better impression than in Closed Beta. We will see if that continues.

One thing you can't help but notice and admire about AQ3D is the immense enthusiasm and energy of its developers. They all seem to love what they're doing and feel very proud of it. There was a choice of ten or so servers at log in although only two were open. They are clearly planning for success.

Sadly, the same can't be said of another game I've had my eye on, Ninelives. It appeared to be trundling ahead steadily if unspectacularly, adding new content and polishing up old, although things had gone rather quiet over the summer. Then I checked the website last night and found this:

After careful consideration, we SmokymonkeyS have decided to temporarily suspend the operation and development of Ninelives.

The main reasons are because since the game couldn't gain enough support from players, we don't have enough funds to continue operating and developing the game and we couldn't maintain the motivation to continue the development. 

 That's a terrible shame. Ninelives was shaping up to be a minor work of art. It's hard to understand why someone would put so much work into creating something so rich and strange only to abandon it out of ennui.

For now the server is still up. SmokeymonkeyS promise that they'll "... keep operating the game server of Ninelives as long as possible". If anyone reading this had vaguely meant to check it out one day but hadn't gotten around to it yet, well, now would be the time.

My feeling is that, as a poster on the forum suggests, the game could be packaged for offline play and either given away or sold for a nominal fee. I'd certainly pay $10 for an offline version as it stands right now. Or they could open source it, but obviously that's more problematical.

One in, one out. The dance goes on.