Speed Dating : Steam Next Fest

Thanks to the hard cutoff at the end of the Swords of Legends Online demo, I found time last night to do what I'd meant to do all along: download some single-player demos to try. I didn't have either the time or the energy to comb through the plethora of short sales pitches in Steam's Next Fest, particularly given the delight the platform seems to to take in stuffing most the entries into all of the categories, but I gave it a few minutes and pulled out a handful of choice-looking plums. Then I played through all of them.

Well, kind of. Let's say I pressed Play on all of them. That's true enough. Of the six demos I downloaded, so far I've only finished one but I've seen enough for a bullet point or two. That's about all you can expect from a demo anyway. Here they are in order of time played.

• The Secret of Retropolis - Minutes Played: Zero (0). Uninstalled.
  

This looked right up my street: "A blend of classic point-and-click adventure with immersive cinematography. Embody the witty protagonist of a film noir plot. Meet unforgettable characters. Solve puzzles. Lose yourself in the retro-futuristic atmosphere". The screenshots looked stylish. I was itching to get started.

It wouldn't play. At all. Clicked the buttons, nothing happened. I tried restarting a few times but no joy. Turns out in my excitement to play I'd missed one key factor: "The Secret of Retropolis is a VR narrative game."Ah! That explains it. My bad. Next! 

• Catie in Meowmeowland - Minutes Played: Four (4). Uninstalled.

 

Okay, this was a gamble. "Catie in MeowmeowLand is a classical humorous point-and-click adventure game. Help little Catie get back home from the bizarre cat world of MeowmeowLand!" Could go either way. The screenshots looked inviting and unusual, like stills from a child's picture-book. I had high hopes although the word "humorous" in the description of any video game always rings alarm bells.

Within seconds of logging in I was fairly sure it wasn't for me. The same art that looks good in screenshots looks awkward and uncomfortable in game. Nothing wrong with it, just not my thing. The visuals would have been manageable if the gameplay had been to my taste but "point-and-click adventure" clearly means something very different to whoever wrote the blurb than it does to me.

• The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout Act III - Minutes Played: Twenty-Four (24). Uninstalled.

Much more of a known quantity, this one. "A whimsical puzzle-adventure game set in the world of the bestselling Redwall books. In this third and final episode, seeking escape from Cheesfthief you find yourself beholden to a family of mysterious Stoats who may or may not be carnivores..." Based on a much-loved series of children's' books and the third installment of an established spin-off series of video games. Should be fine, right?

Maybe. Maybe not. The Redwall series looks like the kind of thing I like but in fact I have never been fond of it. I don't much like Brian Jacques' prose style and when I did try and read one of the books I didn't much like some of the concepts and philosophy either. Still, it's talking animals having adventures and solving puzzles. How bad could it be?

Not very bad. Just rough around the edges and uncomfortable to play. It opens with a lengthy cut scene in which the characters watch a stage play and catch each other up on the plot. I counted four typos in the captions. There may have been more but some of the text was on and off the screen far too fast for me to read it. 

 

After that it was into the game proper. Movement was floaty. I changed the settings several times but it never felt right. The developers have gone for full immersion with almost no instructions and no visible UI at all. Most of the twenty-four minutes I spent with the demo went on trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing and which keys I needed to press to do it. By the time I'd worked that out I'd also decided I didn't care. 

About the only thing I liked were the character portraits and associated text. Those were nicely done. The "Scent" system, whereby the mice identify and find things by smell is original in concept but in execution doesn't seem all that much different to any other "Press key to see things light up" mechanic. To be fair, I didn't play long enough to be able to tell if there was more to it than that. And I'm not going to. Pass.

• The Season of the Warlock - Minutes Played: Fifty-five (55). Completed.
  

Okay, this is more like it. "The Season of the Warlock is a weird adventure game inspired by the gothic tale tradition, with two storylines to choose from. The soul of a warlock of yore, trapped in a portrait, will present Lord Alistair Ainsworth with an offer he will not be able to resist. Or will he? It’s your call..." Looks good, sounds solid. "Weird" is a tad worrying but let's give it a go...

I liked this one. It's a straightforward point-and-click adventure in the way I understand the term. You walk around inspecting things, pocketing things, talking to people and solving puzzles. The descriptions you get when you inspect things are amusing, the things you pick up are logical, the people you talk to are characterful and the puzzles you have to solve are manageable. 

 

And it's funny. Not laugh out loud funny but wry smile funny. The jokes land, most of the time, and there aren't too many of them. Nothing feels desperate or forced which is more than I can say of "funny fantasy" games in general. I was a bit doubtful of some of the historical research (Did they have toy poodles with pompom cuts in the 1840s?) but it seems a bit pointless to quibble over historical accuracy when the basic premise involves a five-hundred year old warlock who can only communicate by way of an oil painting.

The visuals were very impressive throughout, rich and detailed with a tactile depth to them. The UI and the controls, always crucial to the success of a point-and-click adventure, felt well-designed and natural. I'd have gone on playing this one for a lot longer if I hadn't come to an actual "Game Over" screen. I haven't wishlisted it yet but I might. 

• Lake - Minutes Played: Seventy-Eight (78) so far. Incomplete. Still playing.
  

I didn't know what this was going to be but it looked intriguing. "It's 1986 - Meredith Weiss takes a break from her career in the big city to deliver mail in her hometown. How will she experience two weeks in beautiful Providence Oaks, with its iconic lake and quirky community? And what will she do next? It's up to you." After nearly an hour and half I still don't know what this game is and I'm still intrigued.

It's a walking sim, I know that much. I mean it literally, too. Most of the gameplay consists of driving around the small, lakeside town of Providence Oaks, the town where you grew up and which you left over twenty years ago. You're in your dad's postal delivery van. You have letters and parcels for houses and businesses marked on your map. You get out the van, walk up to the mailbox, drop in the letter, get back in the van and drive on. If there's a parcel you walk around to the rear of the van, open the doors, take out the parcel, walk to the door of the house and ring the bell. 

 

When you've delivered everything you take the van back to the post office and go back to your parental home for the evening. Your folks are vacationing in Florida and you've agreed to cover your dad's mail route while he's away. At least I think that's the deal. He could be retired. He's definitely not dead. The phone might ring. It could be your mom. It could be your boss. You talk on the phone then watch TV or read a book. In the morning you wake up, go to the post office, get back in the van and do it all again.

All of this you're doing in your vacation time. You have a real job. You're a coder. You just finished a product. Some business program. It hasn't shipped yet. Your boss doesn't seem to understand vacation time so he's calling you at home and sending you promotional copy to work on. There's some sense of tension there. It is a program, not an app, too. This is all happening in 1986.

 

I didn't read anything on the Steam page before I played this. I was completely at sea for the first half hour. I kept waiting for a plot to develop. It never did. The visuals were so beautiful and the gameplay so relaxing, so immersive, after a while I stopped caring what it was "supposed" to be and just fell into what it was. 

Driving the van is easy and fun. The radio plays, intermittently, and the songs are perfectly suited to the setting. As you deliver mail you meet people from your past and chat with them. Sometimes they ask you to do something for them. I took a lady's cat to a guy on the shore who runs a bait store because she thought the cat was sick and the guy is the nearest thing in the town to a vet. I had a conversation in the video store that felt like it might have been flirting but might just as well not. I had an awkward conversation with my best friend from school, who I'd not seen for twenty years.

 

I really like Lake. It's one of those games that indie devs seem so keen on making that feel to me like living inside a graphic novel from the eighties or nineties, something by Harvey Pekar or Daniel Clowes. Only with even less plot. The more games like this I play, the more I want to play. 

I'll finish the demo for sure. I'm curious to see how long it is, for one thing. I've already done three days' delivery and I'm only supposed to be there for two weeks. Seems like I've seen a substantial chunk of the game already. Lake is on my wishlist now and I highly recommend the demo. It's almost a game in itself.

•  Sable - Minutes Played: Eighty (80). Incomplete. Restart needed.
  

This had the most striking screenshots of all the demos and a description to match. "Embark on a unique and unforgettable journey and guide Sable through her Gliding; a rite of passage that will take her across vast deserts and mesmerizing landscapes, capped by the remains of spaceships and ancient wonders." Sounds great but what about the gameplay? I was nervous.

I needn't have been. This was probably my favorite although it's a close call between Sable and Lake. The graphics are exceptional and they work even better in game than they do in stills. The color palette drives the heat in the day and brings a chill at night. The style has a luxuriant minimalism that evokes sixties and seventies bandes dessinées. I could sense the aesthetic of movies like Barbarella and Dune somewhere in the background.

 

Great graphics in a video game mean nothing if I can't control my character. I was a little worried this was going to be some kind of platformer or jumping game. I don't get on with those as a rule. Sable begins with your character in a desert ruin. With only the most minimal of instruction you're left to figure out what to do next and yes, it does involve climbing, jumping, crawling and all those things.

Joyously, Sable also has some of the most natural movement controls I've run across since I first played Genshin Impact. Jumping, gliding, climbing, riding your sand-bike... everything just feels easy and intuitive. The only real problem I had was a slight tendency towards motion sickness as I careened around the landscape, hurling myself off  high places, spinning the camera with abandon. My fault, not the game's.

 

The demo consists of the opening sequence of what looks like it's going to turn into a young girl's rite  of passage: a walkabout in the desert to come to know herself except the desert is on another planet and the walking is actually riding a hoverbike. Unfortunately, the guy who was supposed to source and build the bike had other things on his mind and forgot so you're going to have to build it yourself. But before you can do that you need to go scavenge the parts from some crashed spaceships...

I mean, come on! Aren't you sold already? I am! It's a melding of very traditional rpg gameplay with parkour-lite movement in service of a classic bildungsroman narrative. The writing is good, too, and there's just the right amount of dialog. It's so nice to play a game that says just as much as it needs to say and no more.

 

I had just one problem with the Sable demo and it's a very unusual one: I couldn't find any way to save my progress. I was so immersed I played my eighty minutes without even thinking about saving and then Mrs. Bhagpuss called lunch. I searched for a save function and couldn't find one so I took the only logout option I could find, assuming the game would autosave and it didn't. There's no save function of any kind as far as I can tell. Start a new game is the only choice.

I think I was probably very close to the end. I'm guessing the demo finishes when you build your bike and I had two of the three parts. I just needed to figure out how to get some beetles to bribe the horrible child who'd hidden the last part and I'm guessing that would have been that. Even so, it was annoying not to be able to come back after lunch and finish what I'd started. 

I certainly don't mind going through the whole thing again but I'll have to be sure of not being interrupted for a couple of hours when I do. Not as easy you'd think. I've wishlisted Sable so I might just leave it until it comes out to start over.

Both Sable and Lake are due to arrive in finished form in September. With Bless Unleashed and New World due in August and quite possibly End of Dragons around the same time it's more than likely my wishlist won't be seeing much use for a while but both of these games are going to get bought and played... eventually.

I guess that's a win for the Steam Demo Fest. Now if they'd just make it easier to sort the demos meaningfully...

It Might Not Now But It Will Be Later: Second Impressions: Swords Of Legends Online

The unheralded demo for Swords of Legend Online that Gameforge dropped on the Steam Next Fest this weekend comes to a jarring halt at Level 15. I'd just zoned into my first instanced "dungeon" as per the tutorial instructions and spoken to the NPC I'd been sent to meet there when I dinged and was instantly ported out again.

It was a bit of a surprise to say the least. A window opened, thanking me for trying the game and suggesting if I'd enjoyed my time there I might want to think about pre-ordering. I politely declined and tried to zone back into the instance to finish my quest but the portal remained resolutely closed.

The game hadn't actually kicked me back to character select let alone desktop so I thought I'd be okay to have a wander around, explore a little, maybe see some new places even if I couldn't gain any more experience. 

I went to summon my current mount, a white tiger I'd rescued as a cub and who, I'd been told, was so attached to me he pined when I was away. Well, he's going to have to get used it. A disembodied voice told me the option was unavailable. No more riding the tiger for me.

No more air-surfing on the blade of my sword, either. Oh, did I not mention that? It happens very early on. There's a quest that gives you a sword about eight feet long that acts as a flying mount. 

Mounts are quite a big thing in SOLO as far as I can tell. Lots of things are. I lost count of all the collectibles, upgradeables, progressables, selectables and sundry other character development mechanics. 

 

Off the top of my head I can remember:

1. Mounts (Self-explanatory.)
   
2. Pets (Not my class pet. Floaty things everyone can have.)
   
3. Avatars (Backgrounds for your character icon)
   
4. Essences (A big constellation thing. Not sure what it does.)
   
5. Achievements (We all know what those are.)
   
6. Biographies (I found those in a menu - there was no explanation in the tutorial)
   

I'm sure there were a few more I've forgotten and I'm also sure there are more that don't turn up in the first fifteen levels. There were quite a few menu options for things I never saw or used, including the entire crafting system, which never even got a mention. 

One thing I can say about SOLO with a fair degree of confidence is that the average player is not going to be short of things to do there. I can't speak to the "content" as in the dungeons, raids and so forth; unsurprisngly you don't get much of a sense of those in the tutorial. but when it comes to working on your character, filling out skill trees and completing collections, SOLO comes out of the blocks at a dead sprint.

I couldn't ride but I could still run. I opened my map to see where there was to go and that voice piped up again, telling me the service wasn't available. Only it was. Whoever had the job of locking the map when the demo ended had been slacking. It still worked.

The map, by the way, is excellent. Maps are a given in mmorpgs these days but they vary hugely in both style and usefulness. Someone ought to write a blog post about it. Only recently I had cause to be scathing about Crowfall's terrible cartography. This, I'm happy to report, is much closer to the other end of the spectrum.

 

When you hit "M" there's a nice, momentary animation as your character opens a map. It's about a second long so it doesn't wear out its welcome the way, say, Lord of the Rings Online's whistle-for-your-pony gimmick does but it's enough to root your action in the world. The map is attractive to look at, clear to read and you can add your own markers. 

I mention it as just one example of the game's overall attention to detail. SOLO isn't some hastily thrown together cash grab; it's a well-crafted, artfully designed, finished product. Well, it seems to be from the fifteen levels. I suppose I can't say more than that. Given that it's been out for several years in its country of origin, China, however, it seems reasonable to assume there's a whole game on the far side of that level fifteen wall.

The completed demo may have allowed me to open the map but that didn't mean it was going to let me go anywhere or do anything. I could run around the zone I was in but that was all. I tried using my recall skill (the name of which escapes me) but it had been powered down. Questgivers wouldn't talk to me. Portals wouldn't open. I could still kill mobs but since I couldn't gain any more xp and mobs don't drop any loot there didn't seem much point.

One thing I could still do was take screenshots. SOLO has perhaps the best in-game camera set-up I've seen. Black Desert Online's might run it close but I don't remember it having quite as many options. 

If I'd left it to the tutorial I would never have known the game even had a dedicated camera option. The tutorial is relentless and lengthy but it isn't all that comprehensive. Or possibly the demo doesn't even cover the whole of the tutorial. I think it's probably that. I have a suspicion the whole of the first thirty or so levels are pretty much all a kind of tutorial because you don't get to stop calling yourself a Novice or a Beginner until then.

 

I only discovered the camera because I was going around the UI pressing every last button and taking every last menu option just to see what they did. There are a lot of them, too. The sixth of seven icons at the bottom of the minimap is a picture of a camera and that's where you open the extensive suite of filters, focuses, frames and speeds.

I spent a while fiddling about with those, taking test shots and posing. The results were wildly variable. It's a complex range of variables that would take some practice to learn but it would be well worth the time. From the look of it, it's also yet another of the character (or account) development features; a lot of the options were greyed out, suggesting they can be acquired as you progress.

A versatile camera is only an asset if you have something worth photographing. That's not going to be a problem in SOLO. The game is gorgeous. I'm not convinced it's any more gorgeous than quite a few other mmorpgs but I'll admit I may be slightly biased against it because the particular aesthetic it relies on isn't one of my personal favorites. Even so, I found myself stopping over and over again to take a selfie against the beautiful backdrops.

The whole world looked a lot better when I'd worked out how to switch off overhead names. In common with most mmorpgs almost everything is on by default when you first log in and in combination with the many pop-up tips and warnings that come with all tutorials it makes for an incoherent, overwhelming and arguably even an unpleasant visual introduction. 

 

I've seen this over and over again in similar situations. I have to assume that either other people really do play with all this crap on all the time and don't even notice what it looks like any more or that developers have found new players are so innately helpless they have to have every conceivable prompt pushed right in their faces or they'll just curl up in a corner and cry.

What with the visual and the aural clutter, I think it says quite a lot for the game that I wasn't put off and that I did carry on playing after the initial assault. Compared to a few mmorpgs I've demoed or trialed recently - Crowfall, Bless Unleashed, Elteria Adventures and PSO2:NG - I think SOLO is the most offputting in this respect. It's largely the fault of the clashing voiceovers and incomplete translations. That's the one real weak point I saw in the whole seven and a half hours I played. If they get that sorted out for launch then I think the game - or at least the new player experience - should be in a very good place.

How robust the gameplay will be beyond the tutorial and the NPE is a lot harder to say. I haven't even been following the game until recently and I have no clear idea of what it's intended to be at higher levels. Is it one of those games that starts out with a linear quest-driven narrative before switching into mandatory open-world PvP? Does it have an endgame focused on raiding? Is there housing and crafting worth the name?

 

If I'm going to plunk down £36 in a few weeks I guess I'd better find out. I certainly didn't get any clues from the demo. What I did get was a clear indication that this is a game with a linear narrative on which a lot of resources have been expended. The sheer amount of dialog and description is almost too much to take in at times.

It also takes up a lot of playtime. When I wanted a picture of the map for this post I quickly made a new character and ran her through the opening stages to get her into the first open zone. I skipped all of the cut scenes and clicked through all the dialog without reading any of it. By the time I got to where I needed to be the character was level three. It took me maybe ten or fifteen minutes. When I played my first character I watched and read and listened to everything and getting to the same point took me closer to a couple of hours.

For that kind of commitment either the story, the writing or the acting needs to be pretty good. As is often the case with translated imports I get the sense that in the original it quite likely might be. It is based on a very successful TV series, after all (which was based on the original single-player video game 古劍奇譚 琴心劍魄今何在, which Google Translate weirdly renders as "Gu Jian Qi Tan, where is the heart of the piano and the soul of the sword?" but Wikipedia translates as "The tale of ancient swords: the story of a guqin and an ancient sword".)

 

In this version, however, as I said yesterday, none of those elements really merits the attention they demand. I'd be very surprised if many people end up playing SOLO for the story. That said, it isn't all bad. There were quests and conversations I enjoyed, particularly the section where my character died and had to find her way back from the afterlife. Or something. I think that's what was going on. I know there were a lot of red flowers and some greedy ghosts and I could see through her head. And I took a lot of great photos.

I don't know about you but I really don't play mmorpgs for the story. I like to feel there's some good, solid lore for a foundation and some sort of over-arcing concept for a framework but other than that I just want to get on with killing my ten foozles and handing in my foozle fangs for coin. It's not really the quality of SOLO's story I might have problems with - it's the quantity.

Before I wrap this up I probably ought to say a word or two about gear. I've complimented the number and diversity of character development paths but other than raw levels, mmorpg vertical progression stands or falls on the way it hands out gear. Once again, it's dangerous to extrapolate a whole game from the tutorial but here's what I saw.

My gear came from three sources: quests, NPC vendors and boss chests in instances. Oh, and I think there was one log-in freebie at the start. 

The quest gear was absolutely typical for low levels. Basic items were replaced by slightly less basic items at a steady pace. All I had to do was follow the linear questline, something the game really gave me no other option but to do. The items that displayed all looked good within the aesthetic. No clown costumes here.

 

Since the fights weren't giving me any problems I never went looking for gear but I happened to notice some vendors in one village so I took a look at what they were selling out of curiosity. I was surprised to find they had full sets of visible armor with very much better stats than mine and that it was going for prices I could afford from just the money I'd picked up while questing.

I replaced my weapon and a couple of pieces of armor that way and I would have bought more as soon as I'd made a bit more coin only I happened to end up doing the wrong instance twice over, trying to find the right one for the questline. In doing that I killed six instance bosses and they all dropped chests and all the chests had armor for my class and every piece was a huge upgrade even to the shop-bought pieces that had been a huge upgrade to the quest stuff.

The upshot of all that is that I don't really know what's happening with gear. Regular mobs drop nothing at all so my favorite upgrade path, randomly killing mobs in the hope they're wearing a pair of pants that fit me, isn't available. I did get a stack of mats to upgrade weapons so I know that's another option. I didn't see anything similar for armor but I'd bet there's something.

The bane of imported mmorpgs for many people are the merciless grinds for mats to upgrade gear. The sheer offputting nature of the gameplay required to feed the endless synthesis or transmutation is designed to drive people into the cash shop to pay for ways to make it go faster. I'm hoping that, as a Buy-to-Play title, SOLO will avoid the worst excesses of that cynical methodology. I imagine there will be some level of grind involved, though. There almost always is.

 

It doesn't much bother me one way or the other. I rarely stick around long enough for it to affect me and even if I do I rarely reach the levels where it makes much difference. It certainly wouldn't put me off playing if it turned out to be the case here. If you're the kind of player for whom that sort of thing matters it would probably be wise to do a bit of research before jumping in.

Nothing I've seen so far would put me off buying this game. More positively, I've seen enough to be reasonably sure I'll get my £36 worth if I do decide to buy. The only thing making me think twice is whether I'd find the time to play right now. 

If we were in an mmorpg lull I'd have pre-ordered yesterday but we're not. Very much the opposite. Let alone the titles coming later this summer, I already have a perfectly acceptable new mmorpg right in front of me in the form of PSO2:NG. It seems somehow reckless to pay for something I may not even get around to playing for a few months.

But... and it is, as the joke goes, a big but... 

It's so good to play a new, AAA mmorpg with the controls I prefer. Honestly, I like the aesthetics and the settings of both Bless Unleashed and New World quite a lot more than I like SOLO's but neither of them is tab target and tab target is what I like. 

I'm going to think on it some more. Chances are I won't buy Swords of Legend Online right away but chances also are I will buy it, sometime. For now, I might just keep it in my pocket for when I need it. That feels about right.

Ridin' SOLO - First Impressions: Swords Of Legends Online

I had a rough plan for this weekend. It involved scanning through the demos in Steam's Next Fest, downloading the ones that looked interesting, playing as many as I could cope with, then putting together a blog post or two about the whole affair. 

I was just about to fire up Steam to get started when I ran into this news item on MassivelyOP. That changed everything. Of all the new mmorpgs due to land this summer, Swords of Legends Online stands out as the only one with a true old-school control system. That alone would make it a must-play for me if it wasn't for the fact that it's also buy-to-play. 

SOLO (a potentially misleading acronym) is already on my wishlist but I really wanted the chance to check it out before deciding whether it merited the £36 asking price. The demo is limited to the first fifteen levels but that ought to be enough to get the measure of things.

 

Yeah, you'd think. After two sessions, four and a half hours and ten levels I'm still not sure. Luckily the demo has another three days to go. Maybe I'll have a final answer by then. 

Meanwhile, let's review the situation so far. 

I guess these days when I look at any new game the first question has to be can my aging PC run it? And if it can, how well?  I'm very pleased to say that so far all the upcoming mmorpgs I've had the opportunity to trial or test have performed reasonably well on my machine. SOLO is no exception. 

I'm learning to check the default settings before I begin playing these days. Every game seems to underestimate the capacities of my hardware so I can't just trust the algorithms. SOLO has a choice of seven graphics settings, a few of which have somewhat idiosyncratic names:

My default was "Normal". Fair enough. As Jeanette Winterson's mother always used to tell her, "Why be happy when you could be normal?" 

I left it at like until I'd made it into the game and had a bit of a run around. Everything seemed, well, normal, so I bumped it up to "High". That felt normal too, only prettier. I've been playing on High ever since with no problems at all. I'll have to try "Ultra" before the demo ends, just to see how it goes, but I think that might be pushing my luck.

Before I could log into the game itself, of course, I had to make a character. That took a while. Choosing a race was easy - there is only one: Human. I was curious to see how the developers had approached the current gender debate but the answer appears to be they haven't noticed there is one. You get to pick either "Man" or "Woman", which somehow seems even more retrograde than male or female.

I picked "Woman" because I always do when I play human or human-looking. Maybe one day I might come up with a post to try and explain why but this isn't that post. Also I'm not sure I know. I probably need to think about that.

 

There are a lot of options and most of the options have a lot of sliders. You could spend a long time in character creation and if you did you might even end up with the exact character you wanted. I didn't. I ended up with one I was happy enough to play for the length of a demo but I'd have to work a bit harder on getting everything just so if I was going to live with my choices for longer than a few days.

The real sticking point was the limited choice of hair and eye color, especially hair. Henry Ford would have loved it; you can have any hair color you like, so long as it's black. As someone who almost always plays redheads (Hi Syp and no, that's not the reason. Well, not the only reason.) I think this may be the first game I've ever played where that wasn't even an option.

Sufice to say, character creation is well up to par. It makes a strong first impression and that baton is taken and carried by the introductory movie, which features a big dragon and a lot of action. What it was about I have no idea but it made a lot of noise and got me all fired up for...

 

...the Tutorial. Oh ye gods, here we go again.

Actually, I should probably save the tutorial, qua tutorial, for a post of its own. I'm guessing it lasts for the entire demo. No doubt that's why they picked Level 15 as the cutoff in the first place. All I'll say for now is that as the first thing you experience it doesn't really give the game the best push it could. Things get better and better as you go along but the first few levels are visually cluttered and quite confusing.

And, honestly, the game's already confusing enough. It's rooted in Xianxia mythology, about which I know absolutely nothing. That would change pretty quickly if I stuck around, I'm sure. Here's one thing anyone hoping to play SOLO really ought to know: you're going to have to do a lot of reading. Or listening. Or both. This is a very lore-heavy game. 

I'm level ten now and it's no exaggeration to say I've spent the majority of my time either reading quest dialog or watching cut scenes in which voice actors read quest dialog out loud. (More on that later). As well as that I've been handed a number of books, all of which can be both collected and read. And they're quite long as in-game books go.

Even travelling between quest locations doesn't exempt you from reading and listening. Many NPCs talk out loud and pop up speech bubbles at the same time. I'm a big fan of speech bubbles but these are really quite jarring, with their thick green borders and the way they often overlap. 

The voicework also overlaps, a particular pet hate of mine. At one point, handing in a quest, there were three voices speaking simultaneously: the questgiver, a nearby NPC and the fragment of a soulsword my character had swallowed (Don't ask). 

Unsurprisingly, I couldn't hear what any of them was saying, even though for once all three of them were speaking in English. Translation is very clearly a work in progress in Swords of Legends Online. I hope they'll be done with it by the time the game launches because the way things are now is utterly chaotic.

It's not as though some characters speak in Chinese and others in English. Or that certain areas or parts of the game have been translated while others haven't. If only!

It feels almost aggressively random. It's not at all unusual for the same character to say one line in Chinese then swap to English for the rest of a cut scene, or for two characters in a scene to talk to each other in different languages.

Written text is much more consistent. Almost everything has been translated - quests, UI, tutorial, books, all of that. About the only exception I noticed was when a signifcant character was introduced. They all get a caption, presumably their name, but it's in ideographs. 

It wouldn't help all that much if those had been westernized, the way all names have been in the quest dialog, because the relentless flood of unfamiliar names made it impossible for me to remember who anyone was. I found the plot comparatively easy to follow so I generally knew what was being done but I was never very sure who was doing it.

 

The voice acting didn't help. Just about everything is voiced although I'd be curious to know just where they found the actors. The general effect is uncannily similar to hearing the sixth-form English class at a minor public school read set texts from the A-Level syllabus out loud. The line readings aren't incorrect and the inflections aren't wrong, most of the time, but there's the sense that it's all a bit uncomfortable and unfamiliar and everyone will be glad when they get to the end of their bit and it's someone else's turn.

On the positive side, the voiceovers frequently diverge from the written text and the spoken versions are almost invariably more idiomatically acceptable and naturalstic, plus the flow is usually better. It sounds as though the actors have been allowed to improvise a little and it helps. 

The text is odd in other ways. For reasons I couldn't begin to understand, lots of words are in different colors. It probably means something to someone but not to me. After a while I just stopped noticing so I guess it doesn't matter much. I do wonder if it will be like this at launch, though.

 

The translations may need more time but one thing that's working exactly as advertized is the switchable control system. As soon as my character loaded into the game I was offered the choice of either "Classic RPG Mode" or "Action Mode". I picked Classic and for the rest of my time I was able to play just as if I was in Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft. You can switch from one to the other at any time but I don't imagine I will. If Ashes of Creation follows this model I'll be very happy.

Interaction with objects and NPCs is supposed to be done by pressing "F" but I discovered quickly that a right-mouse-click also does the job. Or at least it does most of the time. I did run into one or two quest NPCs that couldn't be targetted, which meant they couldn't be right-clicked either. Again, whether this is intentional or an oversight I have no idea.

Even though there's the option to use the Classic mode all the time it may indeed, as the rubric suggests, be more appropriate to swap to Action for combat, at least in these early stages. That's because you can get by with just two attacks if you're lazy. For the class I picked, Summoner, LMB is a small attack that also refreshes the resource and the cooldown of the large attack on RMB. I could kill pretty much everything with a simple rotation of left-left-right or in my case Q-Q-E.

 

How long that will go on for I wouldn't like to say. Not much longer I imagine because there's an extensive skill tree with numerous subsections. I'm not sure how all those are going to fit onto two mouse buttons. I suspect there may be complicated combos. I'll stick with hotbars and my trusty mouse pointer, I think.

However you choose to control it, combat at these early levels is inconsequential to say the least. I have no idea what the death mechanic is because I never came anywhere close to dying. I'm not sure I lost health, which was just as well because I also never found any way to heal myself. Come to think of it I never actually noticed where my health bar was. Maybe I don't have one.

No, I must have because my class has "magical healing abilities [that] can often prove to be the difference between life and death". If I'm going to be refilling health bars there have to be health bars to refill. 

I didn't pick the Summoner for the healing anyway. I chose it because it gets a very cute-looking pet. As is typical with these things, though, you don't actually get the pet for what seems like a very long time. 

 

I first encountered the creature that would become my close companion during a quest sequence I picked up around level eight or nine. It's a quest I suspect wouldn't have made it past alpha in a Western mmorpg, given the negative feedback it would rightly have received for its casual animal cruelty. At least I know how far I can throw my pet by the ears now. Always useful information to have. 

As usual, this "first impressions" piece has run long and I've barely touched on much of what I had to say. (I made notes!)  I think I'll wrap it up for now. Next time I'll likely have hit the demo cap at fifteen and I'll be able to come to some kind of constructive conclusion. 

What I can say from what I've seen so far is that Swords of Legends Online is a proper mmorpg with all the parts in place and working well, translation issues notwithstanding. The visuals, which I haven't really talked about much, are sumptuous and subtle and the whole game looks gorgeous. The story so far is interesting enough by the standards of the genre and the low-level gameplay feels exactly like low-level gameplay in any other similar game you care to name.

 

I'm enjoying it so far but I probably wouldn't be thinking of paying £36 for the box were it not for one thing: the Classic RPG controls. I really don't get offered that option so often these days that I can afford to ignore it when it comes. 

On that basis alone I'm leaning towards buying the thing. If it wasn't for the timing, so many other games about to launch in some fashion or other, I'd most likely have hit the Pre-Purchase button already. As it is, I might just leave it on the wishlist and wait. Maybe it'll go on sale or maybe a time will come when I'll be glad of a new mmorpg. Right now there are just too many to choose from.

We'll see how I feel by the time the demo ends on Tuesday.

Layers And Players

MassivelyOP's talking point for the day asks "Is ‘layering’ tech actually MMO community poison?" A little over-dramatic, maybe, but it's a worthwhile topic for discussion. Predictably, perhaps, much of the commentary revolves around "making friends" and whether instancing and layering makes that less likely to happen.

I have to wonder if focusing on whether or not people “make friends” with each other isn't kind of missing the point of what a community is. A community doesn’t rely on friendships, it relies on acquaintances. 

Think of your local community, whatever that happens to be. A school, a college, a workplace, a neighborhood. Anywhere people find themselves gathered together out of circumstance. In just about every scenario you can call to mind there's an expectation that some kind of community will result. Communities aren't an aberration, they're a norm.

Welcome them or shun them, communities are what we all know, and in any of those communities "friends" will make up, at most, just a small fraction of the whole. It's entirely possible to feel part of a community - and be accepted by others as part of it - without having any friends there at all.

Sam Kash, in the in-house intro that frames the MOP thread, offers an excellent example of how community is founded on experiences other than friendship. He talks about his time in Final Fantasy XI, when there was "the character who remained in the kneeling position by the shops... He wore a pumpkin head and was always there, like a fixture of the landscape". Sam goes on to describe the day that "fixture" got up off his knees and ran to the trading post: "It was like the whole map was involved, like a celebrity was moving amongst us".

It's exactly why layering and instancing works counter to the spirit and intent of any virtual world. For community to form there doesn't need to be friendship but there does have to be familiarity. You have to be able to recognize the same individuals over time.

In a real-life community or neighborhood there will be any number of them, people you recognize only by sight, about whom you know only a very little. Their presence seperates the place where you live from the places where you don’t. It's the difference between feeling like a stranger and feeling like a local. At its best it brings a sense of belonging but at the very least you know where you are.

You don’t need to talk to these people, although it might be nice if you did. You certainly don't need to befriend them. All you have to be able to do is retain a vague sense of familiarity. You have to know them but you don't have to know them.

When the mmorpg genre was young, no-one had to engineer any of this. The technology to sift players into discrete copies of the same zones didn't exist. Would-be virtual worlds cleaved much more closely to the conventions of the physical. Zones had maximum capacities in just the same way sports stadia or cinemas do.

 

Back then, if too many people wanted to be in the same place at the same time there would be overcrowding. If things got really bad some players - paying customers - might have to wait outside until others left. Unsurprisingly, that wasn't popular with either the players or the companies and since the companies were the ones paying people to manage the situation and deal with the complaints they were more than happy to employ technological solutions to prevent it happening.

By the time those solutions became available the direction of travel for the genre had already begun to drift. The whole concept of "virtual worlds" was going out of fashion. Mmorpgs, having begun as something new and strange, were being re-integrated into the mainstream as just another type of video game. 

The advantages were clear but for a few, at least, so were the disadvantages. Not every company was thinking about the effect the new technology might have on community but some were aware of the risks they were taking with the glue that held their games together.

 

When Guild Wars 2 implemented their megaserver architecture they used some fairly sophisticated parsing to try to make sure people got sorted into new maps alongside roughly the same subset of other people every time. As you can see from the conversation (okay, monologue) I recorded in screenshots when the change came it wasn't an immediate success but ANet iterated on it for a while and in the end it worked out okay.

These days I never think about it but by and large I do tend see the same names pretty regularly even when there might be several instances of the same map. Long after the megaserver took effect I would run into the people I'd added in my test, particularly on the World Boss train, something that regularly kicks off secondary maps. I still see a few of them even now, on occasion. It's not as obvious as the glory days of Lion's Arch, when I'd both see and hear the same people chatting in the same place day after day but it's something, at least.

In GW2’s World vs World, however, where the old single server architecture still applies and there’s no instancing at all, I see the same people all the time. (Until the bi-monthly relink resets the whole thing but that’s a different issue altogether…). I’m still playing alongside some of the same people who were in the Mists with me six, seven, eight years ago. I don’t chat with them, or not often, but I “know” them, right down to how reliable their call-outs are likely to be, whether I can expect any back-up if I call for help and what I can expect to hear in chat when one of the team's "characters" logs in.

 

Phasing, instancing and layering all work very efficiently. If all you want from your mmorpg experience is a single-player or co-op game that's always available and which gets a steady stream of new content, it's a done deal. And that's exactly what many, quite possibly most, modern mmorpg players do want.

If you still yearn for that sense of stepping out into a living, breathing, persistent virtual world, though, finding yourself being sliced and sorted and separated in ways you can't control can be disorienting, disheartening and destructive. It risks turning the entire experience into a succession of unrelated episodes instead of the long-running soap opera it ought to be.

That's the problem right there. It's nothing to do with making friends. Layers don't stop you talking to anyone you meet and adding the ones you like to your friends list. Instancing doesn't prevent you sending people whispers. Nothing about the siloing of content mitigates against discussing strategy in guild chat let alone meeting up with online friends at conventions, assuming such things ever come back.

Layering doesn't even remove all possibility of chance encounters. You still see other people all around you. You might even see some of them more than once. 

What layering does strip away is context. You don't arrive at a world boss knowing the show-off who always does a count-down in /say will be there. You don't log in after an update expecting to recognize the names of half the people logging in alongside you. These things might happen but they probably won't. Everything feels much more random than it was. And the human mind does not enjoy randomness half so much as it enjoys patterns.

Layering doesn't harm the gameplay, though, far from it. The opposite in fact. The reason the technology was implemented in the first place was to make playing the game easier for everyone. If all you want is to get to the designated fighting area as quickly and efficiently as possible, kill your requisite number of rats and get out, then layering and instancing were made specifically with you in mind. 

 

If you want to feel part of something that feels a little more, somehow, than just a video game, then the picture's a lot less clear. You haven't lost everything, not even nearly, but you've lost a little. And when it comes to community, every little counts. 

I'll go back to that soap opera analogy. Soap operas last for years, decades even. Episodic dramas come and then they go. Mmorpgs need to emulate soaps if they want to survive because the alternative is simply too hard. No-one has the resources to provide a never-ending stream of content at the pace players eat it up but communities create content, continually, for free.

Just think of your school, your office, your neighborhood. Most of the people there aren't your friends but they are what you and your friends talk about. Other people are content but you have to be interested in what they do to care to consume it. You aren't going to hold that interest for long if you only ever see someone once and never again. 

None of which is to say there should be no technological solutions to the problems of lack of access and overcrowding. There should. Those are real problems. They deserve sensitive, well-designed solutions not quick fixes.

Try Anything Twice

Sometimes it pays to ignore your preconceptions, to give yourself the opportunity to be proved wrong. When ArenaNet posted their roadmap for the summer I was positively scathing about the planned revisiting of Living World Seasons Two and Three:

"I would literally rather spend my evenings cleaning my oven than ever do any of LS Seasons two or three again and as for achievements I never did most of those in the first place so that won't be happening. Once again, good luck to them as likes it. I'll pass, thanks."

Extra sarcasm points for a brave use of "literally" there. Brave it may have been. Correct it most certainly was not.

This afternoon I completed the first of the four Seasons of the Dragons meta-meta-achievements, comprising everything from the opening of Dry Top to the apocalyptic cut scenes that preceded the Heart of Thorns expansion. On original release that content spanned the six months between July 2014 to January 2015. The rerun took just one.

Finishing the first of the extremely asymetric meta-metas netted me an Ascended Weapon chest. Also a metric ton of lesser loot but we'll pass over that for now. The halfway mark requires another six metas. If I can stand it 'til then I'll get an unlock for a guaranteed precursor for an End of Dragons legendary.

I've made no secret over the years of my lack of interest in Guild Wars 2's legendary weapons. And the armor or accessories come to that. Even so, I am interested in the lesser-quality precursors reqired to craft them, if only because of how insanely low the drop rate has always been. 

In nine years, playing two or three accounts each, logging in virtually every single day, Mrs. Bhagpuss and I have seen exactly two pre-cursors drop. One each. I must have had hundreds of thousands of opportunities, maybe millions. Just one came good.

I'm not going to pretend there was any other reason I started doing these "Return to..." missions a month ago. I looked at the rewards and decided I wanted them. I was prepared to shift my fixed position in the name of greed. 

 

I'm happy enough with that decision. I wanted some stuff. I got some stuff. What I wasn't bargaining on was enjoying myself while I did it.

Let's be clear: the parts of Living Story I never liked have not changed a jot. Nor have they improved with age. The awful, poorly-designed, poorly-implemented boss fights are as clumsy, tedious and infuriating as they ever were. The clunky dialog hasn't magically found a spark. The plot holes haven't healed over. None of that has changed.

The saving grace of these repeat performances is that the bad points are much easier to ignore now. The big fights take a fraction of the time because most of the bugs have been fixed, because my characters are somewhat stronger than they were and most importantly because there are accurate, detailed walkthroughs for everything. The infelicities, inconsistencies and outright insanities in the story don't jar the way they did because I don't come to them with the hopes and expectations I once did.

 

With those objections removed, the chapters are better able to stand or fall on their merits. They also benefit strongly from being exposed on a weekly rather than a bimonthly schedule. It's something of a novelty for me to be able to remember what happened in the previous episode when I start a new one.

Conversely, back when these episodes were first released, I was much more invested in the story they were telling. I also didn't know what what was coming next. There is a bit of the "yeah, yeah, let's move it along folks" to my appreciation of the material these days.

That said, it has been unsettlingly nostalgic at times to see these familiar passages play out once again. I'm quite surprised at the things I remember and the things I don't but perhaps what surprises me more are the nuances I must have missed. 

 

I recall just about everything from Fort Salma, the big reception in Divinity's Reach, the trip to Durmand Priory. The Inquest's attack on Taimi is just as distressing even when you know it's coming. Hearing Zojja's voice makes me angry all over again when I think about what's going to happen to her, the way she'll be gaslit and forgotten. 

I learned new things, too. Much of the lengthy series of flashbacks showing Caithe and Faolin's early years struck me much more forcibly this time around. Retrospective foresight casts a weird set of shadows.

One of the really unexpected pleasures has been the interstitials. GW2 is moderately famous for the quality of its art team but most of that praise is directed at the environmental artists. It's very easy to forget how evocative some of the cut scenes and, especially, the loading screen art can be. If the game ever does get the player housing system it so obviously deserves, many of these illustrations would make wonderful wall art.

The Living Story missions only make up about half of the necessary achievements for the meta. The rest come from open-world activities in whichever new map was introduced with the chapter in question. That's almost been more fun than revisiting the story, having a reason to do some of the content I very much enjoyed when it was fresh.

 

Over the past three or four weeks I've completed the whole of the Dry Top meta several times and the Vinewrath meta in Silverwastes as well. I shouldn't really have needed the crutch of the current event to open any of this stuff up for me. ArenaNet are quite possibly the most successful of all the major mmorpg houses at keeping older content in play and you can find a map full of people doing these metas without too much trouble most days. 

The thing is, I never do that. There's a lot of older content in GW2 now and I tend to need a prod to revisit most of it, even though I almost always have a good time when I make the effort.

Overall, I have to say this whole "Return to..." event has far outstripped my expectations. It's even made me reconsider the role and function of structured, personal narrative in mmorpgs. I wonder sometimes if I really know what I want. I'm all but sure I don't always know what I need.

 

Whether this mellow mood will extend to the next set of returning Living Story chapters does definitely remain to be seen. These, after all, were the direct lead-in to Heart of Thorns, the expansion I really liked, and the story at that point was comparatively coherent and compelling. Season Three was the preamble to Path of Fire, the expansion I really didn't like, and if I remember anything about it at all it's not with much affection.

But that's almost the best reason to stay with the process. The rewards may have been why I started but now I'm getting an education. I'm learning new things about the game and about myself and that's a lot more than I expected to get out of something that, when it was announced, looked very much like filler. 

If I find I'm not enjoying it any more then I'll stop but for now I find I'm actually looking forward to each "new" weekly instalment. The next drop should take us to Bloodstone Fen. I spent a lot of time there, once, and I had some very complimentary things to say about it. 

It'll be nice to see the old place again.