Scars Of Destruction - A Key Feature

When the details of the latest EverQuest II expansion, Scars of Destruction, were revealed, I was weirdly excited by one minor feature - the Petamorph Keyring. For anyone who doesn't play the game that phrase is going to require a little explaining.

EQII is and has always been a game that makes enormous play of illusions. Whatever you choose to make your character look like at creation doesn't even represent a baseline for what you'll be looking at for most of your time in the game. You can look like just about anything.

There are many, many ways to change your appearance including but not limited to your gender, species or even your kingdom. You can start out as a human and end up as a rock. This happens all the time, whether you like it or not, because quest after quest has you turn into something other than what you were when you spoke to the questgiver.

There are spells and abilities that allow you to change your form and also an enormous number of objects you can use to impersonate anything from a tiny rat to a full-size dragon. You can change size and shape until you shrink yourself so small you can barely be seen - I was at the bank last night next to someone who'd managed to make themselves both look like a mushroom and be the actual size of one.

You're looking at the highest quality, highest level Necro pet and that's what someone thought the default should be. Is it any wonder illusions are so popular?

Since this can understandably get to be a bit much after a while, you can toggle the whole thing off in Options, something I tend to do after the novelty wears off. From then on you will look like yourself no matter what illusion you're under, even though every NPC will treat you as though you're still in costume.

Something very similar also applies to Familiars, Mounts and Combat Pets. There's both an Appearance and an Equipped slot for Familiars and Mounts, allowing you to combine the best stats withthe best looks.

Combat pets, by which I mostly mean the undead summoned by Necromancers, elementals by Conjurors and warders by Beastlords, can all be switched between the different appearances provided both by the different levels of ability and the various qualities of spells. At least Necros and Mages can do it that way. I forget exactly what it is that Beastlords can do but it's something along the same lines.

That's about all I can think of without looking it up. I'm aware it's by no means all the ways the game allows or compels you to change your form - or the forms of the entourage that swirls around you, like a family of ducklings following their mother. And that's just the bodies. I haven't even mentioned what you - and they - could be wearing...

There, now! Isn't that better?

Many of those illusions are accessed either through the UI or from your spellbook, where they take up no space and get in no-one's way. Some, however, far too many in my opinion, come in the form of items you need to click to activate. These all take up bag space.

This actually isn't too much of an issue for most of my characters, who tend to have far greater issues with hoarding to worry about a few illusions. Before the expansion dropped, for example, I spent an hour clearing some space in my Berserker's bags in readiness. It was a horrific task.

EQII is insanely generous with storage space and I've made quite an effort to take advantage of every opportunity to expand my storage capacity. In just the packs he carries around with him, my Berserker has 502 slots. When I went to check on Tuesday evening fewer than a dozen of those were free. 

Even when I'd cleared out everything that didn't require a lot of thinking about, he'd only managed to empty 88, the equivalent of a single bag. The other seven (You get six regular slots plus two for specific kinds of items, not counting your quiver.) were all still stuffed with junk that "might come in useful one day".

Of the remaining four hundred and some slots, only a dozen were taken up with illusions and just one by a Petamorph Wand, which the Berserker can't actually use, not having access to any combat pets. This feature does nothing for him. 

It's different for pet classes.

When I checked in with my Necromancer this morning, she had more than twenty-five slots taken up with Petamorph Wands. And I realise now that I still haven't explained what they are, although the name pretty much explains the function.

They're clickies that change the appearance of combat pets. Yes, combat pets already have an innate ability to change form, as discussed above, but these handy doodads let you turn them into totally different creatures altogether.

According to EQ2Wire, there are more than a hundred and fifty of these things. More are being added all the time. You can buy them in the cash shop, they get given away as holiday rewards, you get them from quests...

Until now, I've been wary of collecting them because of the space they take up but I'd like to have as many as I can get. They're fun but they're practical, too. Many of the default pets are annoying in one way or another and it's often useful to be able to change them into something that crawls or flies or just doesn't make a really annoying sound in the background all the frickin' time.

That was why I was excited to hear we'd be able to add them to a Keyring. A keyring is effectively a UI element in which you can store items that would otherwise take up bag space. Originally, if I'm remembering correctly, it was added to EverQuest to store the actual keys that were needed to access certain zones, particularly Planar instances, but over the years it's become the generic term for any UI-based storage solution, no matter what you put in it.

EverQuest has made great play of the "Keyring" conceit over the years but I have a feeling this might be the first so-named in EQII. Lots of things you'd think might have used a keyring, like Mounts and Familiars, already have their own UI tabs, so I guess it hasn't been deemed necessary until now.

Almost the first thing I did when I was able to log into the expansion was to get my Necro out and start playing with the new toy. There didn't seem to be any hints or explanations so i just started clicking things and that worked nicely.

All you have to do is right-click a Petamorph Wand and the context menu now offers the option to add it to the keyring. There's a warning that it's an irreversible action but since you can only add Attuned or No Trade wands to the ring that seems like an unnecessarily cautious step. I mean, what else are you going to do with them?

I started adding all of the Necro's wands, one after another, until without warning it stopped working. There weren't any error messages so at first I thought there was something different about the wands I was trying to add. A close look didn't suggest anything but after a while I figured out the reason.

The process had stalled because the Petamorph Keyring operates on the same principle as the Wardrobe, meaning it has a limited number of slots. I'd filled them all, which was why no more wands were going in.

The basic allowance is ten slots, which shows up as five rows. You can expand that a row at a time at the cost of 50DBC per. What the upper limit might be or if there is one I don't know but I would imagine you'll be able to add enough slots for all those hundred and fifty wands and more. 

I'm sure there will be people who'll complain about the cost and claim it's some kind of money grab. For subscribers, though, who get 500DBC as a stipend every month, and who also get a 10% discount on all cash shop purchases, it seems pretty harmless to me.

In fact, as I've said many times, I'm always glad of something to spend my Daybreak Cash on. I have almost 35k on my main account now and I rarely find much I want to buy. There are only so many Prestige Homes you can decorate, after all.

I bought another twenty slots immediately and started filling them up. Unfortunately, I attuned all my wands without looking at them and only after I'd done it did I discover I had a few duplicates. The keyring helpfully tells you when you try to add a wand it's already holding but by then I'd rendered them all untradeable so I just had to destroy them.

Never mind. Plenty more where those came from. And I'll be looking out for them now. I have Mages and Beastlords who can make good use of them and they all heve keyrings of their own. Yes, the keyring is character-based, not account based. I'm sure that will annoy some people as well but I personally prefer to keep my characters cleanly separated whenever possible so it suits me just fine.

And with that out of the way, I suppose I'd better go take a look at the actual content of the expansion. I got an in-game letter from the Far Seas Traders, asking me to go help with something in the new place so I'm going to start off with the Crafting Timeline.

I pretty much have to. I still don't have a max level Adventurer to start the main quest. Although I do have a level 130 boost...

"Players Can Now Rename Their Pet Beds..."

It's been three weeks since I last played Nightingale. Back then, I was still enjoying the ambience and there were things left I could have done but it was all starting to get a bit what's the point?" 

I'd reached the end of the narrative, seen all the main biomes as well as most of their variations, and while there were still plenty of upgrades I could have made to all my gear, the stuff I had was already more than equal to anything I was likely to ask of it. Everything left to do seemed like it would become incrementally less engaging the longer I carried on with it, so I stopped.

This has to be a major problem for all live service games, doesn't it? Holding players' atttention once they've burned through the initial tranche of content. The people making the games certainly seem to think so, even if their bosses don't.

Games with a built-in competetive component have a clear edge. Players don't need much in the way of incentive to keep logging in if their place on a league table depends on it. Moreover, races and fights and matches all benefit from keeping to the same ruleset over time. No need to keep adding new twists and tweaks. Or not so much, at least.

Sandboxes also have a slight advantage in that players generally take longer to fall out of love with their own creativity than with someone else's. Give them the tools and they'll likely not only finish the job but tear it down and start over a few times before they finally lose interest.

If gameplay depends on exploration, storyline or character progression, though, it's going to need constant refreshment to keep people interested. MMORPGs have traditionally managed that through multiple channels, including but not limited to slowing progress to a crawl, dangling the tastiest temptations far out of reach, encouraging tribal loyalties, instilling a sense of duty or responsibilty and of course pumping out half-finished, poorly-tested content as fast as they can shove it down the pipe.

The genre has also relied heavily on a "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" approach to content. By trying to appeal to anyone, from the cuddliest of Socialisers to the most psychopathic of Killers, along with absolutely everyone inbetween, many MMORPGs may have suffered terribly from lack of focus or feature creep but they've also sometimes succeeeded in creating a church broad enough for anyone to worship at, so long as they don't mind kneeling next to heretics and heathens.

As time goes on and the sheer number of MMORPGS, both long-running and nearly-new, continues to grow, these tricks don't seem to be working as well as they once did. Still, it does seem as though they're having more effect than later innovations such as short-lived, cyclical Seasons, a gimmick whose appeal may already be almost at an end, whereas the arrival of an "expansion" can still bring people flocking back to games they once played.

Even a big Update can show up as a significant bump on the Steam charts. I was expecting one of those for Nightingale, which released its first major update yesterday. Known uninspiringly as 0.2 (Seriously, give these things names if you want people to pay attention to them, guys!), it's a fairly hefty package, including some much-requested quality of life improvements and a deal of new content.

The full patch notes (Known somewhat pretentiously to Inflexion as "the Changelog".) are extensive. There's even a video. Here are some of the highlights, along with my comments because I can't possibly keep my opinions to myself, even when I haven't yet had time to see most of this stuff in action:

You can now queue up to six items at a crafting station. Previously you had to complete each one before starting the next, which led to me not tearing down the old ones when I built upgrades, just so I could have more things cooking at the same time. If nothing else, this might save me some space.

Craft stations now pull from storage, which is a huge improvement. I did quite like trotting in and out of different rooms, opening chest after chest in search of a hinge or some coal, but it was kind of a zen thing at best. Crafting is going to be a lot more practical now, not to mention faster. That said, the range from which the stations will pull is quite short. I'm going to have to build a whole new storage area directly above my workroom for everything to be available immediately.

Three new weapons have been added - Sheath of Throwing Knives, Satchel of Grenades and Blunderbuss. Clearly, the intention is to improve ranged attacks, which were very limited and basic. They've also zhuzhed up the existing one-handed weapons, sickle, knife and hammer, so as to allow for dual-weapon builds.

As well as new weapons, we have new mobs trying to kill us. Only a couple but they do look quite distinctive, plus they have new attacks. Some of the existing mobs have also learned new tricks. We'll all need to be on our toes until we get the hang of the new combat techniques. I haven't had the chance to try them out yet but I look forward to being bombed from above and zapped at a distance as I fire my blunderbuss and fling my knives. Once I've made them, that is.

To that end, there are some new quests revolving around gaining the blueprints for the new weapons and learning to use them. The update also cleans up some loose ends on existing quests and allows for more options for players who may have thought they'd locked themselves out of certain choices. Almost the first thing I did when I logged in last night was to go back to speak to someone so I could get an annoying dangling questline out of my journal.

Traders now trade remotely. Or at least they do once you've been to see them at their locations at leaast once. This is a major improvement in utility for the game, not least because some bright spark at Inflexion thought it would be a spiffy idea to distribute all the games hundreds of buyable items and blueprints across dozens of vendors situated in dozens of different realms, each of whom requires you not only to navigate the entire map to find them but to build a damn portal to get there in the first place. 

It made for excellent content - once. Having to keep doing it every time I needed to go back to buy something I either couldn't afford the first time or thought I'd never need but later found I couldn't do without wasn't quite so much fun, so I was very excited to see the change. I was less thrilled when I discovered that I'd still have to go back to every single vendor one more time to set the flag that confirmed I'd visited in person. 

Surprisingly, it seems no-one had thought to record that information until a use was created for it, which certainly tells you plenty about how on-the-fly some of these changes are being made. I would have thought it would have been obvious from the start that we'd end up here sooner or later but apparently not.

And on the subject of things you'd have thought would have been there from the start, lead quest-giver Nellie Bly now has voice acting. I wonder if the eventual plan is to have all NPCs voiced? It seems like a lot of work and expense to retro-fit them all, especially since the impact will be lost on almost everyone currently playing. I mean, I'm not going to able to hear much of what Nellie has to say, seeing that I've finished all her quests. 

I will go visit her to hear what she sounds like, all the same. She has some incidental dialog she repeats. I'm almost curious enough to make a second character so I can hear the rest, though. Puck was very entertaining to listen to so if the standard is maintained, it might be worth it. I guess I ought to hold off for now in case they add more, though. I bet they'll do Dr. Frankenstein next!

There's been a UI makeover. It's been a while since I last played so I'm not one hundred per cent sure what's new and what I've just forgotten was there already but I have to say the whole thing feels smarter, cleverer and all-round better than I remember. It still looks a bit like it was designed by someone who usually does intertitles for silent movies but functionally it's a definite improvement.

Everyone can dodge now, apparently. This one confused me a bit. I wasn't aware anyone could dodge. I certainly haven't been doing it. Maybe I'll start, now I know I can.

Building costs have been "tweaked", by which ambiguous term they do for once mean "reduced". By a lot, in fact. This is quite significant for me inasmuch as it was specifically the large quantities of mats required that put me off building a new home using the more advanced building options I'd acquired in the late game. That alone would give me something to do for a good few hours more.

Which brings me neatly back to the potential impact of this update on both keeping the players Nightingale still has and bringing back some of those who've found other things to do. News of the update was enough to get me to take a look and from my comments on the list above it does appear there's at least a chance I might hang around for a while.

A glance at the Steam charts for the two days since the update dropped, however, doesn't feel quite so cheery. There's just the tiniest blip of interest visible. Comparing the Wednesday before the patch with yesterday, peak population rose by just a couple of hundred. Maybe the weekend will see a better turnout but even if it hits the dizzy heights of a couple of thousand it'll still be less than ten percent of what it was back in Februray, when the game went into Early Access.

And there we have it. The familiar pattern. Wilhelm posted something very interesting a while ago about the tendency of MMORPGs that reach their ten-year anniversary to just keep on going. ArcheAge look like it's about to buck that trend but generally it seems quite reassuring for people playing - and running - games that go back more than a decade. I have to wonder, though, which new games are going to be joining the Decadian Club ten years from now?

At the moment the pattern seems to be a huge influx of players at the moment the game becomes publicly available, be that Early Access, Open Beta or an official Launch, swiftly followed by a swift and precipitous decline, frequently representing the loss of well over 90% of everyone who was there for the first week or two.

When that still leaves well over hundred thousand players, which was Palworld's peak population last month, the future may still be rosy enough. If attrition in the first quarter takes you down to a mere couple of thousand active players, though, which is where Nightingale finds itself, you do have to wonder how long the game can go on.

I guess one way to spike interest is to persuade someone to make a hit TV show based on your game. I did wonder if that might the big announcement New World has planned for June. Nightingale would make a great TV show, if anyone's interested...

Palworld: First Impressions

With more than six million people playing Palworld, almost two million of them literally playing as I write, I imagine the last thing the world needs right now is a First Impressions piece from someone who hasn't even finished the tutorial. Well, tough, That's what's coming.

I will at least try to keep it brief and to the point. To the bullet point, in fact.

Connectivity, Bugs, Practicalities.

Playing solo with multiplayer not enabled as I have been, the game has performed flawlessly so far. There's been no lag and I've not seen a glitch or a bug in just under five hours. Exiting and re-entering the game is swift, saves are automatic and it all feels very competent and clean, especially for an Early Access title. Of course, I may just have been lucky...

Character Creation

For Early Access, again, there's a very decent amount of choice. Palworld employs the newly-popular, ungendered (Body Type A/B) archetypes, something I always like to see. The default character I got was, almost ironically, I thought, a redhead, but they looked unusually and satisfyingly chunky, which I thought might be making a point of some kind. Then again, maybe the first character you see is random. I haven't tried to make another character yet so I can't say for certain. 

Now I look at the screenshot I took, though, I rather wish I'd stuck with that default option. She looks cheerful and friendly. The character I made looks bad-tempered and a bit sharp-faced. I get the feeling she might not like me all that much. It's lucky I only have to look at the back of her head, most of the time.

For now, I'm stuck with her unless I re-roll and start a new world. There's no cosmetic remodelling available yet. It is on the schedule, though. I think I'll be taking advantage of it, when it arrives. 

Graphics and Animation.

The world and the environments within it, the few I've seen (Meadows, small woods and rivers, a lot of mossy ruins.) look very pretty, if not all that detailed. They've gone for a cartoonish vibe that reminds me of a certain kind of kids TV show; it's a rounded, softened, cartoon-realism that's almost not quite really one thing or the other. I always find the style a bit uncanny valley in a show but it works a lot better in a video game. It certainly works well here. 

The character animations, I like. They're bold, broad and lively with no attempt to mimic real-world practice. You try chopping down a tree by swinging at it left, right, left, right, like the pendulum of a clock. See how far you get. Feels great in a game, though. 

Pals (Every creature you see is a "Pal", as far as I can tell, except maybe the huge, named ones.) are goofy and comic, as expected. Lamballs, for example, are hysterical when you kill them - they just roll and roll like tumbleweed until they hit something that stops them, if it ever does. I haven't watched for long enough to see if Pals exhibit much character beyond the obvious species tropes but I suspect they might. 

UI

I found it both comfortable to use and pleasing to look at. What more can you ask? 

Building uses a radial menu, something I'm generally not pleased to see, but I'm finding this one quite intuitive. 

About the only complaint I have, apart from the almost inevitable one about the lack of screenshot and Hide UI commands, is that I haven't yet found out how to give myself a free cursor. There have been a few moments when there was something on screen I thought I ought to be able to click on (A scroll bar, for example.) but haven't been able to find a way to do it. I suspect I just need to read the Options menus more carefully.

Survival Mechanics

Very simple and familiar, if mildly overtuned for my taste, although there don't seem to be many of them, at least not to begin with. Hunger and cold are the only ones I can remember off-hand and cold just goes away as soon as you make yourself some clothes. Hunger was a nuisance at first but now, at Level 7, it's just slightly annoying. I suspect it will become all but unnoticeable before long.

Pals seem to have more Survival issues than the player, as far as I can see. They need to be fed, kept sane and given somewhere to sleep. You get a running commentary on screen of the various issues they're having but even at this early stage, most of them have fixes that can be handled autonomically, for example by placing a feed dish and filling it with berries so they can go help themselves when they get hungry. 

All the different species have their own strengths and weaknesses, something I assume will form a major part of the gameplay eventually, but so far I've been able to ignore all of that and just let them get on with it. They seem perfectly capable of looking after themselves, most of the time, except for Cativas, who are a right, royal pain in the neck. I only had one and I already regret catching him. I've had to retire him from active service because he wanted more attention than all the others put together. Typical bloody cat.

Difficulty

Just about all of the above, I should stress, is entirely optional. The game comes with three preset difficulty levels - Casual, Normal and Hard -  plus Custom, where you can adjust a wide range of parameters to taste. As I usually do with any new game, I started on "Normal" so I could assess what the developers intentions might have been and I'm finding it very comfortable so far. 

I could happily carry on this way indefinitely. Should I feel like changing anything, though, that option remains permanently available. You can switch difficulties from the main menu at any time, including using the custom settings to tweak things to your precise tastes. I'm curious if you can use that to finesse the difficulty level of Boss fights, without having to create a whole, new, easier world. That would be a very welcome innovation.

I probably will change the death penalty after a while, so I get to keep all my stuff when I die, instead of having to run back and pick it up, a time-wasting process that just seems fatuous in a single-player game. I might also turn off base raids, a feature I'm not mad keen on in any of these survival games, except the starving Pals who keep attacking my food store do drop some very handy keys that open locked chests. Until and unless I discover an alternative source of keys, I suppose I'll have to put up with the raids.

Combat and Capture

Hmm. Mostly it's very easy, until it isn't. You have to reduce a Pal's health to make it easier to catch, which is safe and simple on lower level Pals... until you discover they're social and every other Pal around piles on. They also have a loooong leash, so running them off when you get too many isn't always a successful strategy. 

As for fighting anything above your level, probably don't bother. I did manage to subdue and catch something a level above me but the captured Pal drops down to your level so there's not much point. There are also some aggressive higher-level mobs wandering about, even in the Tutorial area. It reminded me of the zone-sweepers in early EverQuest. When I got killed by some flying mob, it felt highly reminiscent of being killed by a griffin in West Commonlands. 

In fact, the whole thing feels weirdly everquesty at times. Even the supposedly Pokemonesque capture mechanic reminds me just as much of those many, many quests in EQII, where you have to fight something until it hits about 10% health before using a quest item to capture it and take it back to the questgiver. I've never played a Pokemon game and yet I felt right at home with the process.

Pals

I guess I might as well cover them here, now I've talked about catching them. They are weird. Not what they look like, which is exactly as you'd expect, but what they do, which very definitely is not. 

They bustle around my base, turning their paws to everything. They start off mining, logging and gathering but as soon as I start to do anything, like build a crafting station or some furniture, half a dozen Pals come barrelling up and start hammering away alongside me. It's great! The more Pals, the faster things go. Combines that take a minute to make solo take maybe ten seconds with a pack of Pals.

And it does feel surprisingly good. About an hour and a half in yesterday, I was beginning to regret my purchase. Things were going just fine but it was clearly yet another Survival game like too many I've played lately and I was wondering why I'd thought I needed another one... and then my first Pal, a Lamball, joined in and helped me make a bed. 

It felt... well, it felt pally. My mood changed instantly. I no longer questioned my decision to buy the game, which suddenly felt very different to anything else I'd played. My whole sense of ennui just evaporated.

How long that's going to last we'll find out in due course but after five hours the novelty hasn't started to wear off yet. It still seems amazing to see a Pengullet watering my berry patch or a Lamball trot by with a chunk of stone on her back. The AI seems pretty sophisticated. I assumed I'd have to give them all tasks or at least micro-manage the set-up for each new addition to the team but no, they do it all themselves and they seem to be doing it pretty well so far. I'm not sure they really need me there at all.

Building

Needs work. It's not at all bad but the design aesthetic feels a tad unsophisticated, although that could well just be because of the low-level materials and designs I'm seeing. What certainly doesn't get a pass is the positioning of the click-to-fit sections, which is too often fiddly and awkward. There are always moments with systems like these when you can't get a piece to go exactly where you want but I spent far too long trying to get sloping roof sections to slot into places they were clearly meant to go without any success at all. In the end I took down the few sections I'd managed to place and swapped the whole thing out for a boxy flat-roofed design that looks bad but at least goes up and stays up.

Other than that, which I'm sure is something that will get smoothed out as development progresses, I was happy enough with the options and the mechanics. I didn't have much of a problem finding a suitable, permitted area in which to build and the starter base is a very generous size. I didn't find it too difficult to put stations and flooring in the spots where I wanted them, although getting things to go under stairs was, as usual, more of a problem than it would be in real life, where "under the stairs" is the homeowner's version of the TARDIS. 

Progression

One of the big strengths of the Survival genre has to be clarity of intent. Unlike many MMORPGs, there's rarely much doubt in the mind of a new player on what to do next. That's very much the case in Palworld, where after five hours of pretty concerted, concentrated play, I'm still very much in the Tutorial phase, following instructions. 

There's an on-screen Tutorial check-list in the top right corner at all times, as well as a list of the current Missions to upgrade my base. Between the two, I found myself pretty much permanently busy, to the point that I eventually started to feel a little claustrophobic. That, of course, was my fault. There's absolutely nothing to stop you just running off to explore, which is what I did when all the chores started to feel like I had a full-time job.

The important thing is that I always wanted to progress. You can see well ahead down the Technology line to the recipes that are coming, which is motivating in itself, but also to lots of items with nothing more than a big ? indicating a mystery recipe you won't unlock until you catch a certain kind of Pal. If that doesn't make you want to go exploring, Palworld probably isn't the game you're looking for.

Even without having pitted any of my Pals against a Boss yet, or having seen or heard one word of narrative (There is a story, apparently.), both of those things being what passes for a throughline in this game, I can already feel the tidal pull of the nested progression mechanics. I suspect this is yet another Survival title capable of eating several hundred hours of anyone's life, should they be incautious enough to let it get a grip.

It's probably too late for me. Save yourself, while you still can.

Dawntide: First Impressions

At time of writing, Dawnlands has an entirely undeserved Steam rating of Mostly Negative. What the hell are those people on?! Seriously, though. What does it take to satisfy people these days? 

Okay, if someone's got their hand up out there to say "Originality", then yes, you got me. Not only does Dawnlands not have an original idea in its pretty little head, it's turned up to the party wearing the clothes of all its favorite games. At once. 

It shouldn't work but somehow it just does. 

So far, I've seen Dawnlands compared to Valheim, Genshin Impact, Breath of the Wild, Craftopia and even Minecraft. I'd also throw in New World but chances are you can find a bit of every survival-crafting-open-world game you ever played in there, somewhere.

Bow-kiting a troll... sorry, a giant.

Does it matter that everything here has been seen before somewhere else? Of course not! 

Everything feeds off everything else, always. Imagine if bands weren't allowed to sound like other bands or writers to write like other writers. Reviewers would be out of a job for a start, since all most of them ever seem to do is try to match new with old like a game of temporal Pelmanism.

So, no, Dawnlands is staggeringly unoriginal. Let's get that out of the way for a start. There's literally nothing here you won't have seen done before and much that you've seen done exactly the same. 

When people say it's like Valheim they really are not kidding. Certain aspects are functionally identical. For instance:

• The first thing you see when you wake up is a bird. Get used to it because it's going to follow you around and tell you what to do.
• You don't just get to make a bed, set it as your respawn point and sleep in it to avoid the dangers of night - you even get the same dreams with the gnomic intertitles and the bad poetry. 
• When you chop down trees they fall and roll and leave stumps and trunks you chop again for more wood. 
• The first creatures you see when you start to explore are annoying little three foot tall gits who swarm you and throw rocks at you. When you kill them they drop resin that you use to make torches, which you use to drive them away at night because the only thing they fear is fire itself.
• At night the skeletons come out to play and boy, are they tough! 
  
• When you die you drop most of your things but you can come back and get it later.
  
• If it rains you get wet and if you're wet you can't sleep. If you get cold you can't sleep either so you need a fire near your bed. You have to keep feeding the fire with wood or it goes out.
• You can make a spit to roast meat but if it rains the fire goes out so you have to put it under cover.
• You can make a raft. I haven't done this yet so I don't know if it wallows like a drunken hippopotamus or not. I bet it does, though.
  

Any of this sounding familiar? Because if not I could go on...

Down! With just one arrow left...

So, yes, it's anime Valheim. The question is, does that matter? Well, only in the sense that Valheim famously had the capacity to draw you in and make you feel part of it. That's the hard part to copy. I think Dawnlands pulls it off but many seem to disagree.

For me, it has exactly that "I wonder what's over the next hill?" quantity that made playing Valheim so moreish, coupled with those "Okay, it's not that late really, I could just fix it before I stop" moments that come when you notice the way you've set the roof on your hut isn't quite right. When I woke up this morning I found myself really wanting to play Dawnlands and as I write this post I kind of wish I was still playing it instead of writing about it.. 

That's very much how I felt in the early days of Valheim. I wanted to play it but I wanted to write about it but I wanted to play it... Then again, I felt a bit like about Palia a week ago. But definitely not as much.

Dawnlands is undeniably "inspired" by Valheim but it isn't just a Valheim clone. It's prettier. A lot prettier. 

No, no stop it! Valheim has a weird, fuzzed-up beauty all its own. Dawnlands, as has been observed, looks not unlike Genshin Impact. Or a Hanna-Barbera cartoon circa 1969. Your choice.

Which look, if either, speaks to you is something only you can know. Both work very well for me. I wouldn't necessarily say either was prettier than the other. Not to their faces, anyway.

No, Hedi. I do not have any mice.

Other than how the two games look, what are the differences? I feel another list of bullet points coming on.

• That bird? It's an owl, not a raven. And it's sweet, not spooky.
• Those rock-throwing creatures? They aren't grey dwarves; they're goblins.
• When you die you don't leave a grave, you leave a backpack. Maybe. I'm not sure. I can't remember. Maybe it is a grave. I'm not going to log in and get myself killed just for science.
  

Hmm. Those differences aren't all that different, are they? Okay, then, how about these?

• You can catch, tame and ride horses.
• There are NPCs all over the place and they give quests, just like in a regular MMORPG.
• There are Achievements and plenty of them.
• There are vendors. 
• There's a cash shop. It sells stuff for both in-game currency and real money. Different stuff, mostly.
  
• You can sit on your shield and slide down hills on it. Try that in Valheim and see how far you get!
• In Valheim, the more you upgrade your armor, the less of yourself you can see. In Dawnlands it's  the exact opposite. (Seriously, what is this? Every time I make something "better" I end up wearing less. I'm going to have to make a male character just to see if the same happens to the guys. (You know it doesn't.))

I suppose we'd better get on with it, Sparky.
This land won't cleanse itself.

One of the more obvious departures from the Valheim model is the part that seems to have been lifted almost verbatim from New World, although I'm more than willing to be told it's actually from Breath of the Wild. I wouldn't know. Never played that one.

Very early on you get told about some sort of evil that's spreading across the land. Dawnlands was developed by a Singaporean team and the English translation is somewhat idiosyncratic, so I'm a bit vague on the details but the gist seems to be that I'm the chosen one and I have to go sanctify anything I see that's turned purple.

If that reminds you of cleansing the corruption in New World, well it did me too. The good news is that, like just about everything else in Dawnlands, it's a lot easier than wherever you saw it last time. 

With the caveat that it's very early days and it might get a lot harder later on, the thing I haven't really mentioned yet is that Dawnlands is a more accessible, faster, easier version of Valheim. There's always the possibilty that it only seems that way because I've done it all before but I think that's just a small part of it.

Dawnlands seems much more interested in being entertaining and approachable than being gritty or  challenging. It's the fun parts of Valheim without the long slog. I suspect that will translate into "without the engagement or the whole point of the damn thing" for a lot of people but not for me. 

I was looking forward to going back to Valheim when the update that lets you set your own difficulty levels drops but now I've played Dawnlands, I'm not sure I'll bother. I wanted Valheim-lite and now I have it.

Home is where the hearth is.

This is a First Impressions post and I think it's obvious that Dawnlands has made a very good one with me, if not with most people. (To be fair, that "Mostly Negative" rating on Steam does split two-thirds against, one-third for, so there's a sizeable minority that feel the way I do about the game.)

I probably should mention that one of the main thing a lot of the Steam reviewers have against Dawnlands is that it's an obvious mobile port. That really seems to get people's backs up, somehow. 

There are a lot of moans about the UI and the intrusive monetization, neither of which am I finding problematic in any way whatsoever. I actually find I really like the kinds of UIs I'm seeing these days that have been lifted almost verbatim from Android. I'm used to them and I find them comfortable and intuitive. I prefer them to a few purpose-built PC interfaces I've struggled with over the years.

As for the demands for money, as usual I barely notice them. I'm not going to be spending anything, anyway. I'm sure I'll get everything I need just from playing. I do in every other game so why should this one be any different? If anything, Dawnlands seems quite restrained in the way it holds out its hand. I've seen a lot worse. I'm playing a lot worse (Looking at you, Dragon Nest 2!)

Um... Sparky? It's getting dark. How far from home are we?

There's also a good deal of kvetching about bugs. So far I've only seen one of note, when I got stuck in swimming animation and had to flop along the ground like a seal. That was pretty funny. Relogging fixed it. Other than that the game's been very well-behaved.

I guess the big question is, how long will this love affair last? Is it going to be a brief fling or a long-lasting relationship? Well, if I knew that...

One thing seems certain. If I do stick with the game I won't be running out of things to do any time soon. 

Among the many useful pieces of information you're given as you log in is the percentage of the map you've explored so far. (Oh, I guess we can add Guild Wars 2 to the list of games Dawnlands borrows from...) After four hours I've explored 0.29% of the gameworld. 

If I played for two hours a day, every day, it'd take me nearly two years to see everything. And that's assuming Seasun Games never add another lake or hill. I'm pretty sure I'll lose interest long before I hundred per cent this thing but I'll also take a bet that I won't  be losing interest for a while.

Maybe someone should run a sweepstake.

Noah's Heart: First Impressions

Noah's Heart is a brand-new, open world mmorpg, developed and published for Android, iOS and Windows by Archosaur Games, best known (If at all.) for Dragon Raja. It uses Unreal Engine 4 and has server clusters in the EU and North America.

The game launched on mobile only in Europe a couple of weeks ago and globally on all platforms yesterday. It uses a free-to-play payment model and currently ranks #2 in the Free Role Playing category on the Google Play Store and #4 in Role Playing on the Apple Store, with ratings of 4.6/5 on both.

I've played the PC version for a little over three hours, including pre-launch character creation. My character is Level 31and some way into Chapter Two of the main storyline. These are my early impressions: 

It's good. I like it. 

Oh, you want more? Okay. 

It's hella similar to Genshin Impact, for a start. Remember when it came out and everyone went "Wow! That really raises the bar"?  We were right. GI went on to make an absolute fortune and it's clearly the benchmark now for any developer hoping to be taken seriously in the all-platform-F2P-Open World-RPG stakes. That's something we should all celebrate.

That said, Noah's Heart isn't as instantly impressive as Genshin Impact and not only because it didn't come first. The aesthetic, while delightful, is less well-defined and the graphics, while gorgeous, aren't as sharp. 

Whether the world is as deep and fascinating, it's a little too early for me to judge, not least because at Level 31 I've seen barely any of it. The world is, presumably, vast. A tool tip on a loading screen mentioned eight continents and hundreds of islands. So far, all I've seen is some random countryside, a city and the inside of several very small instances.

I'm coming for you, Heidi!

The reason for that is the story, not that it's especially compelling, thrilling or even interesting. It's definitely not. So far, it's very much a by-the-numbers anime mmo plot, involving the usual princes, kings, charming rogues, handsome officers and an unfeasible number of very young women in unsuitable outfits running every which way whenever you turn around.

The dialog is nothing out of the ordinary, either. I've played quite a few imported titles where I got the strong impression the writing would have been laugh-out-loud funny in the original language. I doubt that's the case here although the translation is just shaky enough cast some doubt. 

I ought to make it clear at this point, in case anyone reading this is unfamiliar with my established perspective, that I tend to think of shaky translations as a feature not a bug. The nuances of language exposed that way are endlessly fascinating. 

You don't get out much, do you?

I'd take just about any limping, broken-backed attempt at rendering one culture's demotic take on familiar fantasy tropes into the vernacular of another over the dull, plodding, worthy Heroic Prose of many a game's native English text. Your mileage, as they may or may not say in Seoul, may vary.

By similar inductive reasoning, I also have considerable time for voice actors who give oddly-inflected line readings, which is just as well. I'd rate the voice acting in Noah's Heart as competent at best, pedestrian for the most part and occasionally downright peculiar. 

At one point I was all but convinced one of the NPCs was being voiced by some kind of text-to-speech app, the inflections were so robotic. Then, in the next scene, the same character began speaking with recognizeable and appropriate emotional emphasis. Did the director have a word with him or did someone tweak the settings on the AI? We'll never know.

Ya think?

 

If the plot isn't anything special and the acting isn't either, why have I done virtually nothing other than follow the storyline for the whole three hours I've been playing? Oh, several reasons...

1. There's one holy heck of a lot of it.
   
2. It's relentless.
3. Seriously, it never stops.
4. And its all cut scenes.
5. So. Many. Cut scenes.

Even so. Surely I could have just ignored it and done my own thing? Well, yes I could. There's nothing to stop you doing that, if you want. Only I didn't want.

Drama! Excitement! Threat! I was there! (Watching)

The fault is entirely my own. I feel quite guilty about it. In former days, I would never have allowed a game to direct me so forcefully. I'd have veered off the intended path and made my own way, ignoring the story altogether if need be. 

In those days, though, there wasn't a single button that played the game for you. In Noah's Heart there is and I love it.

I've always apreciated mmorpgs with an autoplay function. Who wants to find their own way to anything, amiright? I mean, you guys have satnavs, don't you? The problem with automated questing systems tends to be that they only do half the job. They run you to where you have to be next but then they leave you to do all the work. 

Noah's Heart has possibly the best autoquesting I've seen. I've used it for the whole questline so far and it hasn't made me irritable once. All I do is click on the quest in the onscreen quest tracker and my character trots to the next NPC and opens the dialog window. If there are teleports to take, she takes them. If it's a long way, she summons her horse, jumps on and rides. 

Speaking of horses, whoever came up with those names deserves a raise. Either that or they need to go back on their meds. I'm not sure which.

It's slick, smooth and strangely soothing to watch. Let's be honest, it's fricken' addictive. Given the extreme quantity of cut scenes and the paucity of combat quests, it feels less like playing a game and more like watching a somewhat shambolic anime - from the inside!

Sometimes you even get to "control" the characters within the cut-scenes, something I can't recall ever doing before. There was one part where my character and three of her pals had escaped captivity and were running through a castle courtyard and a button popped up on screen for me to press so each of them in turn could somersault over a barrel or slide under a haywagon. 

It felt like we'd segued into some sort of make-your-own-movie game and, honestly, it worked really well. I'm not sure what would have happened if I'd declined to press the button at the appropriate moment but it never even occcured to me to find out. I was sufficiently invested to want everyone to get away, which I guess means the story's better than I thought it was.

Although who I'm supposed to attack in here escapes me.

Mention of on-screen buttons brings me on to the UI and the control system. It's good, or at least it's good for me. 

In these days of center-screen targeting and action controls, new mmorpgs where you can do everything with the mouse are hard to come by. Noah's Heart is one of those, not because Archosaur has gone full WoW-style for the PC release (Although it does have tab tagetting.) but because all they've really done is kept the mobile controls and mapped them to the keyboard as an option.

There are large circles or icons for all the relevant actions on screen in the lower right corner, where your thumb would go on a tablet or phone. They're all neatly labelled and swap themselves in and out according to context. 

If you play by keyboard you might find the key choices a little weird. I know I've never seen K and J as primary and secondary attack before. They're all remappable, though, and you can just click the on-screen buttons with the mouse pointer if you prefer - which I very much do.

Every instance boss takes a moment to pose for photos just before the fight begins.

As a result, I was not only able to win every fight in every storyline instance so far, I was able to do it while meeting all the requirements for all the bonuses. Such a thing may never have happened before, although it may also be because the fights so far have all been incredibly easy, even the bosses. The bonus criteria specify "No more than two heavy injuries" (Or something like that. It means getting knocked out after losing all your HP, I think.) but so far I've yet to go under about 90% health at any point.

I seem to remember Genshin Impact was also easy at the early stages but that's presumably to boil the frog. Like GI, Noah's Heart is a gacha game, where the company hopes to make a fortune by leading you into a debt spiral of purchases, in this case of "Phantoms", the collectable NPCs who fight alongside you. 

Unlike Genshin Impact, however, so far there's been very little combat at all. The whole "kill ten rats" part of the package seems to be entirely absent. I've barely seen an attackable mob outside of the storyline instances, far less been sent to kill one. Even inside the instances there have only been one or two groups of enemies, easily disposed of, before the boss.

One of the very, very few mobs I've had to kill for a quest.

Presumably things will get harder - much harder - as the game progresses, although I kind of hope not. It's been a charmingly laid-back experience so far and I'm in no hurry for that to end. 

This First Impressions post is going to stop now, though. Not because I don't have anything more to say - I have plenty. Barely scratched the surface! I'm just going to save it all for Blaugust, which starts on Monday. New games always give me a ton of ideas for things to write about so the timing couldn't be better. 

With luck, Noah's Heart might last me all month. I played Genshin Impact longer than that and this feels like a rerun. Or maybe a cover version. And I do love my covers.

Ikonei Island: Open Beta. Very First Impressions

Remember, back at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons? I wanted to play, too but AC:NH is a Switch exclusive. You can't play it on PC. 

Well, you can, if you want to download an emulator and jump through a bunch of hoops, some of which look highly dubious to me. I don't think I'm even going to link to the site with the instructions. I'm sure you can all find it the same way I did if you're curious.

I considered buying a Switch just to play New Horizons but as far as I remember availability was poor. It would have been aberrant behavior for me anyway, buying a console just to play one game. It was 2020, just after the first lockdown and I was still on furlough so that may have had something to do with it

In the end, I found a much cheaper and more reasonable cure for my rare case of FOMO. I installed Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp on my Kindle Fire instead. As I'm sure everyone knows, AC:PC is considered a hugely inferior entry in the Animal Crossing canon but I liked it. I posted about a few times, played just about every day for several weeks and then sporadically for a few months more until I eventually, inevitably, drifted away. 

I occasionally think about playing Pocket Camp again but I'd forgotten all about New Horizons. Or I had forgotten about it until this morning, when I read this post at MassivelyOP. Describing a new game I'd never heard of, Ikonei Island, a quote from the developers namechecks both Animal Crossing and another game I've read a lot about over the years, Stardew Valley.

Srtardew Valley has never appealed to me, partly because of the graphics, which lean very heavily into a nostalgia for a period of gaming that means nothing to me, but also because farming games are boring as hell. Part of what appealed to me about New Horizons as I was reading about it was the way it didn't seem to revolve around planting and watering. 

GIven that level of disinterest, I'd probably have carried on by had it not been for the two embedded videos. Particularly the second.

Four and a quarter minutes of piratical hurdy-gurdying is a hard ask, for sure, although I'd totally rock a red velvet frock coat like Patty's. It says something about the game and its developers that they thought it would make an effective - or even appropriate - promotional tool. I guess they must have been on to something, though. I mean, it landed me.

I watched as much as I could take of the video, which was about a minute, then I took a look at the gameplay trailer. At just over ninety seconds it's a lot more approachable and it shows the game to good advantage - or it does if you can tune out the bilious voiceover. Cheese and ham, anyone?

It immediately reminded me not of the two mentioned games I haven't played but of another I have: Yonder the Cloud Catcher Chronicles. Yonder was one of the first games I bought on Steam. I played and posted about it several times, most recently in June 2020, when I picked it up again after a long layoff for precisely the same reason I've ended up writing about it today: I saw something that reminded me of it.

I have never finished Yonder. I haven't given it a fair crack, even. I realised that as I was reading Kluwes' commentary on his own time with the game. I'd always struggled to find the thread of the narrative when I played, ending up rambling inconsequentially through the gorgeous scenery, getting nowhere and not really minding. Kluwes made it seem a much more coherent, completable game than I'd ever felt it to be. He 100%ed the entire thing and made it sound easy.

I was seriously considering starting Yonder over from scratch but of course I haven't done anything so dramatic. Or decisive. Instead, I seem to have jumped on the first available train heading the other way. 

As soon as I'd watched the videos I opened Steam, found the Ikonei Island store page and registered for the open beta. Acceptance was immediate so I downloaded it and started playing.

It says "Beta" in the description but the version number (bottom left) says "Alpha". Feels more like an alpha build to me.

First impressions are excellent. There's a charmingly illustrated introduction in which an unnamed narrator tells the story of four orphans - two humans, who look like they might be brother and sister, a lizard and a ... pig? - all of whom narrowly escape being taken by slavers (Who are also pigs for some reason.). 

They speed away on a raft powered by a magical wind released from a flask tossed to them by the mysterious narrator and end up, wrecked in a storm, cast up on the beach of some desert isle. It's a great beginning and the gameplay that follows backs it up admirably.

I would go into detail but I've only managed to play for about three-quarters of an hour.. Yes, okay, I could easily spin those forty-five minutes into a five post series if I had the mind to but I don't think that would do the game any favors. I want to leave a good impression because for the short time I was able to play, I really enjoyed myself.

"Rain, rain go away..." Or actually don't. I quite like it.

I can fill in a few notes, at least. The characters, animations and models are delightful, albeit a little hard to see, what with them being so tiny. There's seemingly being no way to zoom in with the fixed camera. The island, what little I saw of it (Mostly the shore and some ruins near the river.) is beautifully rendered in lush blues and greens, all softened contours and rounded edges. 

It rains all the time, which is both a plot point and an aesthetic pleasure. Everything looks and feels like it's been drawn in pastels then gently smdged with a damp cloth. Frogs hop, crabs burrow and occasionally an aggressive plant detaches itself from the undergrowth and has to be soundly clouted with your "sword", a branch with the leaves still attached.

Hedda is the only charracter I've tried so far. I think you can play all four of them although I haven't figured out how to swap yet.

The UI is clear and attractive and I found the controls quite manageable, which may put me in a a very small minority indeed. The game opens with a warning that it's best played with a controller because the mouse and keyboard options aren't optimised and there's a thread on the game's Discussion page, in which the OP describes the beta keyboard controls as "unbearable" and everyone else agrees. I'd have to say I've seen a lot worse. Try playing Final Fantasy XI sometime...

That said, the controls do need some tweaking and the developers have already said it won't happen in the current beta, so even though I'd encourage anyone who likes the look of the screenshots or the gameplay in the video to give it a try, do be aware that it's not even Early Access yet. It's a proper beta. Or maybe an alpha...

Fear my mighty leaf. Sword! I mean sword!

It's so much a work in progress, in fact, that I ran into a proper, gamebreaking bug. When I got to the second area of the island and a new cut-scene played, the game registered a fatal error and shut down. The same has happened each time I've returned to that area, which is why I stopped and wrote this post instead. 

Otherwise I'd still be playing.