Catching Clouds: Yonder

I started playing My Time At Portia because Tobold mentioned it as an alternative to Animal Crossing: New Horizons for people who wanted something similar but more traditional. At the time, following the suggestion of Jen of Book of Jen, I was already playing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp as my own alternative to not having a Switch.

Almost as soon as I began playing MTAP I was reminded of another game I'd bought, played and forgotten a few years back, Yonder: The Cloud Catcher. As I carried on playing I found I thought about that game more and more.

Last night I fired up Yonder for the first time in three years. As it was loading I read a little bit about it. Seems Yonder is now available for the Switch.

I played Yonder for an hour or so. It took me a while to get used to the slightly off-kilter controls and the floaty movement. After a while, though, I fell back into its comforting groove. It's a gentler, slower game than My Time At Portia. It might well be a better match for those who find Animal Crossing too formless but MTAP too rigid.

After a while I put down Yonder and picked up My Time At Portia again. I spent a good while there, looking at plans to expand my house and working out how to make some money to do that. I did a dungeon. There was fighting.

By the time I'd finished it was getting very late. When I went to bed, for the first time in what feels like a long while I didn't feel able to log into Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. I wanted to but it was just too late.

Only a week ago I felt I might be running out of ideas for what to play. Now I can't fit everything in.
It looks as though I may be back at work by the end of the week. Something will have to give. I hope it's not Animal Crossing.

It's a pity Tobold couldn't have discovered My Time At Portia a month ago...

The Way You Wear Your Hat: GW2

I have never liked the way Guild Wars 2 handles appearance. For an MMORPG with an endgame predicated on fashion wars it's always seemed clunky and awkward.

In part, that's down to the business model. There's a good deal of favoritism directed at cash shop clothes, not just in the inevitable higher level of detail and greater care taken with the designs themselves, nor the enhanced frequency with which new lines come into stock, but also in the way the game allows you to swap them in and out.

I don't propose to enumerate the confusing and convoluted mechanics of the conflicting systems. The game's closing in on eight years old. Everyone who cares already knows and no-one who doesn't needs to waste time finding out. Suffice to say the whole farrago's annoying enough to have stopped me paying it much attention for years.

As well as the practicalities, there's also the small problem of looks. Most of the supposedly desirable outfits just aren't to my taste.

I have a habit, almost a tradition, of spending the first Sunday after a character dings eighty trawling through the options and fixing on a signature look I plan on leaving unchanged forever. When that happens (and I've only had one character hit eighty in the last couple of years), most of the pieces I want are skins I've already unlocked or things I can buy very cheaply on the Trading Post.

It came as a big surprise to me a few weeks ago, when I ran across an outfit I not only hadn't seen but found I wanted. World versus World has picked up a lot in recent months and I've been spending a lot longer there than for a year or so. One week towards the end of April I played so much I completed not just the first set of skirmish chests, Wood, but also the second, Bronze.

Time was when I would routinely get all the way to Platinum most weeks but these days I rarely even finish the first set of four. There's not much motivation since there's nothing in the chests I want. If there was, I wouldn't have over a thousand of them stashed in my bank vault, on one account alone.

That's why I hadn't noticed ArenaNet had added something to the end of Bronze. I spotted a small, red chest icon I didn't recall seeing before. I opened it and it offered me the choice of three sets of Warlord's armor: Light, Medium and Heavy.

Not expecting much I started to open them up in the Dressing Room to see what they looked like and to my complete amazement I found I liked them. I particuarly fancied the Light hat. It looks like something Admiral Nelson might have worn.

I asked Mrs. Bhapgpuss, who still plays a lot more WvW than I do, if she knew anything about it and she told me it had been added just a few weeks earlier. It was, in fact, part of the massive WvW and PvP focused update on 25 February. I read the patch notes at the time but they were so humungously huge I must have have missed the relevant line: "The Warlord's armor set has been added. Warlord's Armor Boxes can be obtained from the WvW Skirmish reward track."

Getting a set for my Elementalist, the character I do 99% of all my WvW on, seemed like an eminently achievable project. You can only get one Warlord's Armor Box per match and there are six pieces so it should have taken me six weeks. And amazingly, that's exactly how long it did take!

I nearly missed the target by a week. I'd done the first five weeks without having to think about it much, mostly on Sunday afternoons, finding a Commander with an open squad to follow after I'd done my dailies. This week, though, I'd somehow forgotten all about it until Friday evening.

WvW matches reset on Friday at around midnight or one a.m. my time. I was going to just let a week slide and pick it up again on Sunday but then I remembered you get a bonus in the new match for having at least finished the Wood set in the last one. I thought I might as well get that done so I'd be set up for the next match. Then one thing led to another, I had Tier 6 participation, it seemed a shame to let it go to waste...

I ended up playing WvW for about three hours after tea, finishing the Bronze set at about nine in the evening. I had stuff to do in Norrath and Portia so rather than rush the ceremony I left the great re-robing until this morning.

Which is when I was reminded all over again just how irritating GW2's clothing options can be. First I had to select all six items separately from a list of eighteen, all with very similar names and icons, being extremely careful not to mis-click and end up with the wrong weight or slot, which would mean another week to get the right one.

Making the choices put six actual Exotic quality items into my bags. All I wanted was the skins, of course. Anyone able to get the six Bronze chests in WvW is almost sure to be wearing at least Exotic in every slot, most likely Ascended or even Legendary but it seems churlish to complain about getting real gear instead of skins. There will be players who'll use the exotic gear and be glad of it. It's account bound so it can be handed on to other characters, assuming they use the same weight. It can be salvaged into mats. Well, maybe. I haven't checked that last part.

For me, though, the six pieces will probably sit in the bank until the game shuts down. That's the main reason I hardly ever open any armor or weapon boxes, of which I have dozens. As boxes, they stack. As armor, they don't.

The Warlord's armor automatically unlocks a skin for each piece as it flops into your bags, making the whole process even more redundant - or generous, depending on your perspective. The next stage was to translate those skins onto the Ascended armor my Ele was wearing.

Simple enough. Except doing that overwrites the current appearance, meaning my Ele would lose her signature look. If there was a way to store appearance templates, like there is to save builds, that wouldn't be a problem but there isn't. Again, in a game that's basically all about looks, how is that possible after eight years?

I wanted to be sure of being able to go back to my old look and that meant doing some paperwork. When you apply a skin to an item it does still tell you on mouseover what the name of the original piece was but not what the last skin applied might have been. I had to write all six down in a book! In longhand! What is this? The 19th century?

It also cost me six transmutation charges but that was the least of my any concerns. I have more than four hundred saved up. When you never change your look they tend to acumulate.

Anyway, I got it done and I'm very happy with the result. My Elementalist looks like a kid going trick-or-treating dressed as Lord Nelson. A very peculiar kid . Freakish, even.

The other weights aren't as attractive, at least to me, but I enjoyed getting the Light set so I might carry on and get Medium and Heavy, too. It's something to do, isn't it?

In Ruins : My Time At Portia, Landmark

There are forty-seven posts on Inventory Full tagged "Landmark", fifteen EQLandmark, five EQNLandmark and three EQNextLandmark. Sony Online Entertainment and Daybreak never worked out what Landmark was meant to be and I never settled on what to call it.

Building defined Landmark, from its inception as an eye-wateringly expensive buy-in alpha to its demise a mere three years later. The game, if it was a game, something no-one ever really seemed sure about, never had much of a loop but its one consistent feature was construction.

As far as I can tell, after just nine hours, My Time At Portia is no kind of building game. I don't believe you create anything from scratch. And yet, Landmark is the game it most reminds me of so far.

The similarity struck me like an acid flashback the first time I visited the Abandoned Ruins, although I was already experiencing some deja vu, even before I got there.

I'd come to the Ruins in search of copper ore. I needed the ore to make bars. I needed the bars to make a grinder. I needed the grinder to make copper pipes. I needed the pipes... well, I've forgotten exactly why I needed pipes just then. It know seemed important at the time.

For the purpose I'd made myself a pickaxe out of wood and stone I picked up off the ground. I paid the fee for a week's access to the Ruins and stepped into a featureless cavern. I wandered around for a while until I saw a rust-colored patch of wall. I hit it with my pick and the feels came flooding back.

Maybe there are dozens, scores, hundreds of games with this exact same mechanic. I'm sure there are. There can't be many that look and feel so very similar, though, can there?

It's not just the mechanics of it, which can't vary all that much - hit surface with hard, sharp object, make a hole. It's the way the hole deforms, the precise, imprecise shape of it. The way it's like tunneling through chalk, brittle, friable, until you stike against a vein of something sterner, your pick clangs, you feel the judder and shake through your fingers on the keys.

It's the fragments and shards as they spin into your packs, the lists of numbers and kinds. It's the colors, the ores, the striations across the surface; walls, floors, ceilings. Above everything it's the tactility, the sound, the repetition. So soothing, so calm, so addictive.

Landmark's earliest iterations had no caves and caverns. You had to dig your own. The underground world and its creatures came later. You entered a cave, you explored, you mined, you foraged. There were creatures. You fought them with weapons you'd made.

My Time At Portia comes with a combat system much better developed than Landmark's ever was but that's a topic for another post. It also comes with a backstory. There was a civilization. It fell. These are its ruins. Go glean them for relics so we can rebuild. Simple but very much something.


By comparison, Landmark had nothing. Why were they there, those caverns with their mysterious machines and strange creations? No-one knew, no-one cared. And with nothing to discover, no-one stayed. Only the builders.

In Portia there's purpose. Maybe too much purpose. Another post for another day. In the ruins you scan, you search, you find. Occasionally your scanner exposes a hidden room. Inside, creatures. You fight them. There's loot. And treasure.

It feels like adventure, just a little. Landmark's caves felt stranger, less comfortable, scarier. My Time At Portia does everything so much more sweetly. And better. Just... better.

Landmark suffered terribly from two things: ineptitude and complication. Everything was clunky and awkward. All the tools were unintuitive and confusing. Word was even the developers didn't fully understand how best to use them. It was down to players to explain best practice in videos and documents.

Nothing ever felt quite right. There was no polish. And yet Landmark was both compelling and entertaining for all its manifold flaws. I enjoyed my time there. Some of it, anyway.

Had SOE or Daybreak been able to achieve even half of the simplicity and elegance of MTAP the servers might still be running now. But Portia has the huge advantage of knowing what it wants to be. Landmark never did. Also, hubris. Always with SOE,there was hubris. Daybreak don't suffer it so badly. That's why they were able to close Landmark down.

After the Ruins, outdoors, back in daylight, I upgraded my basic axe to a bronze model to chop bigger trees for hardwood. I hacked the trunk of a tree. Chips flew, then whirled around me, into my bags. I remembered Landmark had the exact same visual effect.

And the same progression. Different sizes of tree give different qualities of wood. Different qualities of axe are required to fell them. Most games of this kind must use a similar heirarchy. The one I happen to have played is Landmark. The iterations are near-identical.

Even the crafting stations are reminiscent of Landmark's alpha. The time when there were several and all were important. You ran something through one to make something for another. Later, I seem to remember, there was just one that did everything. Or am I imagining that?

Landmark is a blur, honestly. I remember it in lightning flashes or long meditations. Nothing much between. I remember my first house in the mountains. I called it Skycatcher and worked on it for weeks.

Not that you could name buildings in Landmark. I only named it in my mind. In Portia you can name your workshop. You have to for your license. And then the name appears over the door, not just a sign but a portent. Of purpose. 

And that's where the two games split hard. Landmark never went anywhere except where you took it. It was a sandbox with pretensions but no direction. It's too soon for me to say exactly what My Time At Portia is but it's evidently something. It has direction and focus. Landmark had none beyond what you brought with you.

It's too soon too to say whether I'll stick with Portia. At the moment it feels as if I will but I say that so often and then I drift away. For all its faults I did stay with Landmark, all those posts attest, even if, mostly, I just visited, once in a while. When I hung around, though, what made it stick was the building, that one thing Portia paramountly doesn't have.

But the building in Landmark scared me. It was quicksand. It pulled me down. It ate time. If I miss it it's only the way a dry drunk misses drink. Glad to be free of it. Glad it's gone.

Portia has some compulsion and detachment issues of its own. I'll be getting to those another time. For now, I'll just say it scratches an itch I thought I didn't have, one I'm not sure I want to flare up again. Let's hope the differences are more meaningful than the similarities because I really don't need another Landmark.

My Art Is Better Than Your Art

I've clocked up around six hours in My Time At Portia now. That's not long but, boy, do I have a lot to say about it. So much I barely know where to start. To save from splurging a whole slew of incoherent impressions I think I'll try and focus. Let's begin with how it looks.

In the comment thread to the original post several people suggested I should try Stardew Valley, which is either a much superior take on the same genre or the game MTAP blatantly rips off, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it does the same things only better.

Except it doesn't. Not from my perspective. In much the same way Tobold was clearly looking for something in Animal Crossing: New Horizons that the game was entirely unequipped to give him, so I'm finding something in My Time At Portia that Stardew Valley can never offer - a three-dimensional, soft-focus environment that looks like an animated movie.

Graphics in video games. Hmm. It's a minefield, isn't it? No-one wants to admit to being a graphical snob. I like to think of myself as having an eclectic, open-minded attitude to all the arts, not least because that's a comfortable self-image to hold, but like most people I have quite strong preferences and, indeed, prejudices.

When it comes to first impressions, graphics are probably at least as important to me as gameplay. Maybe more. It's not so much that I'd keep playing a dull game that had great visuals as that I wouldn't stick with a game that looked bad for long enough to find out what the gameplay was like. Indeed, I wouldn't be as likely even to try a game that looked visually offputting in screenshots and videos.

When we're talking about open world games or anything that purports to simulate a virtual environment, graphics are what pull me in. I always score highly as an Explorer archetype on Bartle and similar tests but I'm a very particular kind of explorer: I'm a virtual tourist.

The explorer archetype encompasses discovery in all its forms, not least gameplay, but I'm the kind of "explorer" who likes to take snapshots. One sure sign of whether I'm going to stick with a new game at least for a while is how long it takes before I open the Options menu to search for keyboard shortcuts so I can take screenshots and hide the UI.

In My Time At Portia I was already taking screenshots before the opening boat trip ended and I wasn't listening to Presley's introductions because I'd tabbed out to google how to take screenshots without the UI. It seems you need to do a quest first and you can't get that quest until you persuade some NPC to like you enough that they want to give it to you. More on that if and when I find out who it is, where they are, what they want and how to get it.

It's all very well saying I like the graphics in MTAP but what do I mean by that? I'm no art critic but I know why I like. Time for a little show and tell.

I've cropped this shot to lose the UI although I haven't tried to clean up the quest-tracker text on the right. I do that in some shots. I'm kind of picky that way.

The screenshot above covers several aspects of why these particular graphics work so well for me. Both the colors and the surfaces are very flat, something I always find hugely appealing. In comics, I always responded strongly to the kind of mid-20th Century abstract naturalism of Alex Toth, a style explained very well in this short article. Carl Barks, Disney's "good" duck artist is another fine example of what pleases me.

It's not going too far, I hope, to bring in Rothko and the colorfield artists. When the Tate describes that style as "characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour", that's very much what we see in many video games and animated cartoons. Or, at least, in the good ones.

There's a lot more going on in that shot above than use of color, though. The use of textures is exemplary, I think. The paint on the doorframe, the bricks in the wall, the grain of the wood in the grandfather clock (which tells the correct in-game time), they all give just enough of a nod to naturalism to trigger recognition. It's a brilliant balancing act between what things look really like and the impression they leave.

This is the interior of my house. I made the table but I found the sofa. Art and gameplay intertwine.

Even though it's a static shot, you can also see the excellence of the animation, something I find increasingly influential in my enjoyment of the games I play. Firstly, my character is sitting on a seat. It's strange just how powerful that feels.

The ability to position the player-character convincingly on items of furniture has become a commonplace but not all games do it well. This one does. Look at the angle of the legs, one foot slightly turned, raised, the other flat. That's such a natural posture. And look at the axe, laid across her lap, her hands loosely clasped across the shaft. Honestly, it's a joy just to look at her.

Then there are the paintings. One of the things that struck me very early on about My Time At Portia was the way the artists use art within the internal context of the simulation. The paintings, posters and signs in the streets are convincing and evocative. The buildings' interiors display a wealth of decoration that never seems notional or random.

I just noticed the way her fringe (bangs, if you must) displays differently - and more appropriately - under the hat. That's some attention to detail.

Here's a fine example. This is the nave of the Church of Light. In the background we see Lee, the pastor. At this point I'd already had a long and difficult conversation with him, during which he told me plenty about his apocalyptic post-post-apocalyptic religion. I was scared, as you well might be if a crazy person lectured you at length about doom and destruction in the street.

When I came to look around his church I found it decorated with these massive murals depicting the destruction wrought by the previous civilazation, out of whose burned ruins the world we see in the game has painfully rebuilt itself over centuries. The paintings above depict huge war machines creating floods and fires as despairing citizens are slaughtered.

On the opposite wall of the church we see the rest of the story. The picture on the left is, I think, a representation of the long, wild years, when nature took back its own, while the few survivors did what they could to weather the storms.

Then we come to Peach. I don't yet know Peach's story but Peach saved the world, somehow. There's Peach, standing heroically a top a rock, cloak flowing in the wind, as the people give praise. The sun rises through the clouds in a glorious new dawn.

It's all there in the art, which complements the dialog from an entirely seperate moment in the game, bringing nuance and context. I thought it was brilliantly done. It was one of the highlights of the six hours I played yesterday.

What I don't know is whether the foreboding I feel when I look at those paintings is foreshadowing, something intended by the artist, or whether it's something I'm bringing in to the gameworld from outside. That's how art works.

Art in a video game, though, can never be just art. Graphics exist to serve the game. Something in those murals may exist to be elaborated upon and opened out by plot and gameplay. The poster of the lost dog could be bittersweet set-dressing or a pointer to some quest yet to come.

That's something pictures in a gallery don't have to contend with. In video games, perhaps trying to separate graphics and gameplay is foolish. But we are all often fools when it comes to the choices we make.

I'm over-influenced by the way things look but at least I know it. Maybe, to some extent, I even understand the how and why of it. And even if I don't, well, at least, like any Philistine, I know what I like.

Don't I Know You? : EverQuest

One of the nicest things about playing EverQuest from the Guild Lobby is the view. You wouldn't think so, given it's nothing more than a vaulted hall, but it's probably the best place in Norrath to go people-watching.

The Lobby used to be the only public space where buff timers didn't count down so it's always been a very popular spot to afk for long periods. At some point it morphed into the locus for generous players to discharge their Mass Group Buffs before logging, which only made it an even more popular venue for hanging out.

I mentioned it back in the very early days of this blog. It was 2012, EverQuest had just gone Free to Play and I was wondering how that might go. Not too badly, it seems.

Before they moved to the Lobby, MGBs used to happen in Plane of Knowledge. I'm not sure when that changed. Ironically, buff timers don't decrease in PoK any more, either, so we could all go back outdoors but we don't.

Instead, we all stand around in what I've always thought of as The Dogpile. Ever since the Overseer feature was added I've been logging in twice a day to choose my permitted ten daily quests. They run on timers that vary from six hours to forty-eight, always in multiples of six for some reason.

I never know what I'm going to see when I log in. I have my view scrolled back into first person and my Magician stands in the heart of the crowd so when she opens her eyes she's often inside someone, looking out.

It's not unusual for me to do a double take on logging in. EverQuest's graphics may be scrawlings on a cave wall compared to modern games but if there's one thing they don't lack it's variety. Even so, what I saw this morning made me sit up.

As far as I can tell, the figure in the screenshots above is either a Mercenary or a Pet of some kind. His name is Ashborn but he doesn't come up in a /who under that name and /inspect returns a curt "You cannot inspect that". You can rename pets and mercs so it seems a likely explanation.

Whatever he is, he's very clearly a Beefeater. Or a Yeoman Guard, to give him his Sunday name.

Familiar from the gin bottle, these are the ceremonial guards who stand around the Tower of London, exhuding the dignity and gravitas of any village hall production of Gilbert and Sullivan. Why the hell there's one in Norrath I have absolutely no idea.

Or I didn't until I started googling it this morning. Apparently there's a mob called "an ornate guard" in a zone called "Morell's Castle" that may use this model. I found a single picture on the web of a Named called Omander the Devoted who definitely does. There's also a step in a quest called Morrell's Challenge that requires you to "Find and defeat a Champion of Morell, the beefeater".

Morrell Thule is the Lord of Dreams, a demi-god in Norrath's extensive pantheon. His castle forms part of the 2010 expansion House of Thule. To date, a decade after it arrived, I have seen maybe two of its zones. I have never seen the Beefeater model before and I have no idea why someone thought it might be a good idea to introduce it to a fantasy world with which it has absolutely no thematic connection or resonance.

Maybe the person to ask would be Senior Artist Kevin Lydy, who mentioned in an interview in 2011that he "did some work on the Beefeater". I don't recall his name, either, but he was with the game from before launch and is apparently the artist responsible for the iconic EverQuest logo.

Whover did it, and why, logging in to be faced by such a familiar image is disturbing, to say the least. How, as the saying goes, unlike the life of our own dear queen... or possibly not.

I Like This Place, It's (Not) A Zoo

I have Tobold to thank for this one.

A while back, when Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about, he asked his readers whether they thought he ought to buy it. I hadn't played it myself so I dropped a link to a very interesting article on Gamesindustry, which I thought might help him decide.

Tobold bought New Horizons, played it for a week or two, didn't much enjoy it and stopped. Since then he's had an eye out for "a better game of the same genre" and now he thinks he's found one.

It's called My Time At Portia, which is, I think, an extremely curious title for a video game. Especially that choice of preposition. The first thing that came into my head when I saw the name was "Last Year in Marienbad", closely followed by "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" and "My Dinner with Andre".

There is something of a naming convention going on here, isn't there? Or maybe it's just me. Then again, this whole genre, the so-called Life Sim, seems redolent of a particular inflection of post-modern irony, one that curves so far back around it meets its own faux-naif self-reflection coming the other way. It's children's entertainment sub-texting Baudrillard.

It also happens to be kind of the corner on which I live. Or where I'd like to. I would if I could. I'm very envious of everyone who's playing New Horizons (although I notice most people have gone quite quiet about it lately. That always happens.). If I had a Switch, I'd be playing it.

Instead I'm playing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, which is barely an Animal Crossing game at all by most AC fans' reckoning. And, yes, I am still playing it. Every day. And enjoying it, although it's so laggy some evenings about all I can manage is to craft a couple of things and send Pete around in his van to fob off all my animal friends with a few butterflies and fish. I'm surprised some of them can remember who I am.

It is the animal friends thing, isn't it? That's why Animal Crossing. This is what I was saying to Tobold. I realize that in video game industry terms AC:NH, Stardew Valley, MTAP and a whole bunch of others are part of a specific gaming genre but AC:NH broke out because of those animals, didn't it?

I know they're what does it for me. There's a koala bear, who reminds me of  Pump Up The Volume era Christian Slater, doing an Elvis impersonation in my cabin (My cabin? My Cabin!). I'm being quizzed about my sleep patterns by a superannuated extra from Animaniacs. It's orders of magnitude more compelling than having similar interactions with cartoon human beings.

You work with what you've got, though, and I don't got a Switch so I thought I'd give My Time At Portia a go. It's on sale on both Steam and the Epic Store right now. I very nearly bought it yesterday but then I noticed there was a demo so I downloaded that instead.

I love this map. Barnarock, the peninsula in the north-east, is where my character comes from. Portia, where she lives now, is around the coast to the south.

I played it today and now I'm a bit stuck. Not in the game, which is paramountly simple to understand. No, I'm stuck over whether to carry on playing the demo, which I'm very much enjoying or to stop and buy the game while it's on offer for cheap.

Here's the thing. Unlike most similar set-ups, progress in the demo is not transferrable to the game proper. Usually what happens with these things is you download the demo and play it and if you like it you pay some money and either it opens up the rest of the game or it allows you to transfer your save file when you start.

People have clearly complained because there's a big warning on Steam telling you that's not going to happen. I'm glad I read it in time. I don't know how long the demo is or how far you can get but I do know it would be very annoying to have to do it all over again if you weren't expecting it.

Demos exist to show potential customers enough of whatever it is for them to make a purchasing decision. The MTAP demo does an excellent job of that. I already know enough about the game to make my choice. It's a very good demo. The problem is, I'm just not a very good customer.

I know I want this game. I like it. I like the colors, the animations, the conversations, the gameplay. I could already critique it from the couple of hours I've seen. I took a lot of screenshots in preparation for a first impressions post, which this isn't. It would have been a very favorable review.

I'm sure it's not perfect. For once it doesn't seem to be in Early Access so I think we have to treat it as feature-complete. Replying to Tobold, Redbeard noted some translation issues and those are quite apparent even in the demo.

Only I really like "translation issues". They both amuse me and make me think. And anyway, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between text that's been mistranslated and an idiosyncratic prose style. When Oaks says "I'm kind of simple", is that poor use of idiom or is he expressing a political philosophy? I mean, he's walking around a technologically advanced city dressed in culottes and a bearskin cloak... it's hard to be sure.

So, there's no doubt in my mind that this is a game I'd enjoy. Except for one thing. It's single-player.

I have a problem that seems quite common among people who've played a lot of MMORPGs, which is that I find it very hard to commit time to games, even online games, that don't offer evidence of the presence of other players. It doesn't have to involve meaningful interaction; I just need to know they're there.

Take Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp for an example. I play it one hundred per cent solo. There isn't even any mechanism for communicating with other players as far as I can see. You can't group with them or talk to them. But they are there.

I see them standing about. Just one in each of the tiny zones. I can see their names. I can see their outfits change. I can trade with them and make friends with them (in the most abstract way). Their mere presence somehow validates all the time I spend there, even though clearly it does nothing of the kind.

My Time At Portia is very reminiscent of a game I bought a few years back and about which I posted a few times. That game was Yonder. I liked it a lot, but According to Steam I played for just six hours. The last time I logged in was July 2017, which was also the month it released and the month I bought it. I played it a few times and then I stopped because I was the only one there.

If I could carry progress over I'd just keep playing the demo until there was nothing left to do. Put off any decision that way. But I can't because, if I did decide to buy the game, I'd have to do it all again. Not a terrible hardship, I know, but still...

You're either on the bus...

Then, Yonder was quite an empty sort of game. Very beautiful but without a huge amount to do. By most accounts, MTAP does a far better job of keeping players entertained and motivated. The very gaminess of it as compared to the beingness of Animal Crossing seems to be what drew Tobold to prefer it in the first place.

It wouldn't draw me but I can't play Animal Crossing without I buy a Switch and there aren't any and even if there were I am not ready to pay that much just to hang out with my animal so-called friends.

Maybe, with plenty to do, I won't find Portia empty. And I'm better at playing single player games now than I was in 2017. And it's only £9.99...

Sod it! I'm going to buy it. There, that's that sorted out. Thanks for the advice, everyone! This is what blogs are for!

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.