Spellfarers Early Access: Very First Impressions

It's about time I admitted I'm probably never going to find a "cosy" MMO I truly enjoy. I keep telling myself it'll happen one day but it never does. 

On paper the genre looks so enticing - housing, pets, whimsy, relaxed pace, no pressure - but when it comes to the games themselves, almost none of that turns out to be true. All too often they feel more like forced-labor sims than the chill zentertainment they're sold as.

I was firmly reminded of all of this when I spent an hour with the latest cosy candidate, Spellfarers, which went into Early Access yesterday. I got an email alerting me because I had it on my Steam wishlist, although I have no memory of putting it there. Even though I didn't have any real interest in starting a new game just now, it seemed rude to ignore the invitation, plus I thought I'd at least be able to get a post out of it. Cynical, perhaps, but here we are.

I want to say right upfront that nothing I say about the game from here on is meant as a review, let alone a judgment. I only played for an hour and the game has only just entered EA. I'm sure it will change out of recognition in the coming months and years, assuming it makes it that far.

These are just a few very first impressions of the game as it stands right now, based on my experience as a brand new player in the first hour... which, as we all know, is quite a bit longer than most players will give any game if it doesn't immediately grab them.

First off, I really dislike logging into a game on Steam for the first time and immediately being sent to a third-party website to register a separate account. It negates a significant benefit of playing the game through Steam in the first place. I don't particularly lay the blame for this on the developers. It seems to me Valve ought to be able to hand off the necessary information seamlessly and  automatically, asking for any additional details the developer might require to be submitted through Steam itself.

Hang on... did I enroll in Agricultural College by mistake?

At least registration was simple - name, email, password, confirmation email, done. That took me directly to login and thence to character creation, which started off very well indeed. There's no cut scene to sit through, thankfully. Instead there's one of those Dear Diary openings, where your character muses to her journal about what she's about to let herself in for, complete with all her hopes, anxieties and expectations.

I've encountered this mechanic a few times and this is one of the better implementations I've seen. The visuals are charming, the writing is good and the necessary information slips down smoothly. Along the way, there are also several multiple choice questions to answer, ones that might indicate something substantive, either about the character you're creating or the gameplay you'll encounter or both. 

Or neither, which is the problem. I picked several options that might have quite serious gameplay implications - a rival instead of a friend, a nervousness about meeting new people instead of an eagerness - but the game gives nothing away. The choices could be pure color or the equivalent of picking a class. It would have been nice to know.

This is me, mid-makeover. Imagine the Before shot. No, don't.

Still, that was the highlight of my hour in Spellfarers. From there on nothing was that much fun. 

Character creation proper is very obviously a work in progress, with many options shown not yet available. It's also invidious and uncool of me to say it  - or even to admit I noticed - but the default character the game offers as an example before you start to alter it is... hideous!

Seriously, I cannot remember seeing a more unappealing character looking back at me, first blush. I wish now I'd taken a screenshot but I couldn't wait to get the image off my screen. 

Not that the final version I ended up with was that much better. I just couldn't do anything about the mouth, which seemed to veer between a gormless, open-jawed gape or the pouty version I went with, where her lower lip looks like she's just been stung by a hornet.

I'd also suggest that the character you start with ought not to be wearing a hat, especially a large, wide-brimmed one that covers half the face. I'd nearly finished making my adjustments before I finally found to the option to change or remove headgear, after which I pretty much had to go back and start again.

Eventually I got something I felt I could live with and into the world I went. The conceit is that you're a witch-in-training (Witchcraft seems to be something you have to go to college to study in this world.) who, as part of her studies, has been sent to do field research on a surge of magic that recently hit a small town called Wenngrove.

What that really means is exactly what it has meant in every cosy game I've played so far, namely you're about to go to work for the town council as some kind of indentured laborer.  As is made very clear quite early on, the main responsibilities of a witch are getting to know everyone, not pissing them off, and farming. Oh yes. Farming.

Pardon me? "You witches?"

Y'know, I'm coming to realise it's not so much that I don't particularly enjoy farming in video games, it's more that I actively dislike it. It's dull, repetitive, quotidian and tedious. Why would I want to sit in front of a screen pretending to plant seeds and water them? Is that entertainment?

Well, apparently, since millions of people love to do it. Which is fine. I just need to stop imagining I might be one of them. I can just about tolerate something like the Once Human take on farming, the basic version of which takes  two or three clicks, with anything more complex going to automation. Any game that tells me I need to "make good use of the land you've been given", though? That game can go take a flying leap.

And what about that land I was given, eh? Something very off about it, if I'm not mistaken. It's a run-down cottage that used, until very recently, to belong to another witch, who's mysteriously gone missing. In suspicious circumstances. 

What happened to her, then? And isn't she going to want her old home back when she returns? If she returns. What do you know that you're not telling me?

What are you implying, Luan?

I imagine I might be reading more into all of this than was intended. Either that or I missed something when Luan the guard sent to show me around my new home, explained how it came to be available. I confess I probably wasn't listening all that carefully, due to having seen all of this so many times before.

Inside the shack there's a spell book left by the previous incumbent, which I immediately appropriated. Again, is that acceptable behavior? At least in My Time At Portia it was clear I'd inherited the house and all its contents from a deceased relative. Here I just seem to have moved into someone else's home while they're away and claimed squatter's rights.

Using the spell book and some reagents that just happen to be handily lying around the house, I cast the one and only spell in the book and summoned a familiar, which turned out to be a mildly sarcastic, slackerish cat. I liked this part. The spell mechanics were easy but satisfyingly tactile and the graphics were the most impressive of anything in the game so far, which admittedly isn't saying a lot. Spellfarer's isn't exactly a feast for the eyes, on the whole.

Sarcastic cat is sarcastic.

You get to name the cat. The game curiously tells you only you can see the name so you might as well have some fun with it. I called mine Splodger, which is what we call one of our neighbor's cats. They do look a bit alike. 

Until this point I was still kind of loosely on board but this is where the game lost me. My next move was to go into town and meet the Mayor (I think it was the Mayor. It's almost always the Mayor...) in the central square for some kind of induction process. From then, everything stopped being fun.

For one thing, it was night and I couldn't see anything. I found the game-world very dark even in the middle of the day.By night it was almost impossible to find anything. I only managed to locate the path into town by walking along the edge of the area, pressed up against the boundary, until my character slipped through a gap I couldn't see. Usually I tweak my screenshots for the blog but I've left all of these unretouched to show just what I had to look at. And even then, the screenshots look quite significantly brighter than the same scenes looked in game. 

Hey, at least I have my nameplate to light the way!

I tried to change the settings to make things lighter but I couldn't find any way to adjust the gamma. Most of the controls are only available through a series of nested menus, which made it annoying to keep going in and out looking for buttons to press every time I came across some new annoyance, which was often, so mostly I just put up with whatever was getting on my nerves. Obviously, that didn't do much to endear the game to me.

Things didn't get any better when I found the Mayor and they explained a bunch of stuff about how the town operates, including the fact that certain shops and facilities are only open at certain times of day and that everyone has their own lives to lead and might not always be where you'd like them to be. Oh, joy...

It's a truism in MMORPGs that NPCs have no lives of their own. They stand at their shop counters or on their street corners 24/7/365, always ready to buy whatever you want to sell or tell you their problem so you can fix it. We've all complained about how unrealistic it is and how much better it would be if NPCs could behave more naturally. I know I have.

What makes you think I don't have things to do, Sulo? Wait... don't answer that.

Except it isn't better at all, which is why it rarely happens, at least in MMORPGs. It's bloody infuriating to go to speak to an NPC and find they've gone to bed or to the Inn or to the fishing hole. It strongly suggests the developers believe the imaginary time of an pretend shop-worker is more valuable than the actual time of a real customer, which is probably not the impression you want to be creating if you want people to pay you money.

Cosy games do tend to lean into this trope, often making it overtly clear that NPCs are the more important members of the community by making you jump through hoops to ingratiate yourself with them. More important than your character might be fair enough, but by implication they're saying NPCs are more important than you, too, given you're the one at the controls. At first, I found that quite cute. Now I find it borderline passive-aggressive and decidedly unamusing.

In the case of Spellfarers, the irritation I was already feeling at being asked to go speak to a whole list of service providers, any of whom, as I was warned, might have better things to do with their time than speak to me, was compounded by the simple fact I couldn't find any of them. I wandered about the dark, drab, unattractive streets for what felt like hours but was probably ten or fifteen minutes, looking for imaginary people who might as well not have existed.

Well, fuck you, too!

Spellfarers is a multiplayer game so I saw several other players wandering about, some of whom seemed to be doing the same as me. I found a number of the places where the NPCs I was looking for worked but none of them were there. 

Finally, just as I was about to give up, I spotted one of my targets, jogging down the street towards me. I walked over to intercept them (Default movement is a disturbing sort of power-walk. If you can run or sprint, I couldn't find the key.) I tried to get their attention as they passed but the only response was an unconvincing apology and a vague promise to "talk later" as the jogging figure disappeared into the distance.

That, I felt, was adding insult to injury. I'd had enough but as I turned around, I spotted another player who appeared to have found one of the NPCs on my list, miraculously at their place of work, for once. Willing to give the game one last chance to get on my good side, I waited until the player moved on them approached the NPC and spoke to them.

Want me to collect your dry-cleaning while I'm in town?

They turned out to be the one who was tasked with helping me get my new cottage into better shape. The "help" they were willing to offer, however, consisted mostly of unsolicited and frankly unwelcome advice, along with the loan of a watering can that wouldn't even hold water. I was told to go see the Blacksmith to get the thing mended, then come back so we could get started on "getting your farm fixed up".

Splodger had something to say about that. Also about the NPC and his unfortunate manner, both of which opinions I wholly endorsed. Where we differed was that my familiar, at least, seemed grudgingly willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. I was not.

I logged out and I very much doubt I will be logging in again.

Chipper? Smug, I'd call it. And condescending...

As I said at the top, none of this is in complaint about Spellfarers itself. It seems in decent shape for a title that's just entered Early Access. I'm sure that, if it keeps getting updates and improves as these games tend to do when well-managed, it will find an audience. If anyone reading this is a particular fan of cosy titles, they  could do worse than give this one a try. It's free, after all.

As for me, I think I'm going to try to wean myself off the idea that cosy gameplay is my kind of thing. I suspect the truth is that, when it was very hard to come by, it seemed a lot more appealing than it does, now you find it absolutely everywhere. 

Feel free to remind me of that next time I post about yet another cosy game I'm optimistically trying out. I won't listen to you, obviously. Why would I? I never listen to myself. But at least you'll have the satisfaction of saying "I told you so" when all my best hopes come to nothing yet again.

When You Climb To The Top Of The Mountain

I arrived in Bloodstone Fen last night in the middle of a heated discussion in map chat over whether or not GW2 was a "grindy" MMO. The first line I read was "if you don't like it go back to WoW" so it was already clear any further contribution on my part would be pointless. Not that I let that stop me.

A little while later, tabbing to check Feedly between zones (GW2 has some of the longest zone loading times I have ever seen, although the new PC has improved things somewhat) I came across Aywren's plaintive post entitled "MMO Soul Searching: How Do You Learn to Relax at End Game?". The two events, co-inciding, set me thinking.

Aywren's post has attracted some excellent, thoughtful and helpful comments from Jeromai, Dahakha, Karinshastha and several more. Some could easily stand as blog posts in their own right and the thread is well worth reading in full.

My own reply there is perhaps more negative than I intended but the question of what to do at the cap has always been a thorny one for MMO players. The traditional vertical progression model, developed in the days of a near-universal subscription model, has always relied very heavily on building retention, often at the expense of entertainment. As I said in my comment "these games rely on players never reaching a plateau where they can stop, relax, look around and take stock. If that were ever to happen there would be a significant proportion that would conclude they had “beaten” the game; they would stop playing and stop paying".

I missed that memo. Again.

As a natural Low Energy gamer, playing primarily for relaxation and amusement, I have not spent a great deal of time at the cap in most MMOs. My tendency has been either never to reach the maximum level at all, even in games I played for a significant period of time (Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, LotRO), or to quit altogether soon after I did (Wizard 101, Rift).

It's very telling that the handful of games in which I continued to play just as fervently after hitting the cap are those that heavily encourage the making and leveling of "alts". (Alts is a term I have always disliked and avoided but that's a topic for a post of its own. I'll stick with it for clarity).

Aywren's difficulties in FFXIV, as she describes them, are twofold. Firstly, the activities necessary to continue playing and - most importantly - to feel she is pulling her weight at the cap, tend to be stressful rather than relaxing. Secondly, due to the game's "do all the things on a single character" design, the escape hatch offered by other games of simply rolling another character is firmly closed.

As she says, "FFXIV really discourages alts...in fact, rolling an alt just feels like even more work". My own short time with the game, which I loved in many respects, told me exactly the same thing. Indeed, the sheer implausibility of ever playing and enjoying multiple characters in Eorzea was one of the main reasons I declined to subscribe after the free month.

Now what, Piggy?

MMOs in which I have had - or currently do have - one or more max level characters all take the opposite approach. EverQuest, EQ2, Vanguard and GW2 each have many races and many more classes, multiple starting areas and an array of disparate leveling paths that make it not just possible but positively appropriate to repeat the leveling journey over and over, even when the destination has already been reached.

They all also benefit very strongly from having either a huge choice of horizontal content, alternative and discrete vertical progression paths, or both. Frequently, if you would like to become self-sufficient - always one of my goals, if one that's seldom achieved - an army of alts is not an indulgence but a necessity. Players of the traditional "one Main, one Alt" variety find this approach as unattractive as I find it delightful, which is, of course, how game economies are built.

The argument in map chat over GW2's "grindiness" fell down over definitions: one person's "grind" is another's "farm". I confess to willfully contributing to the confusion. Sometimes I just can't help myself.

I have a very straightforward definition of "grinding" in MMOs: grind is any form of repetitive activity I don't enjoy. "Farming", on the contrary, can readily be defined as "something in game that I'll happily do over and over and over just for the fun of it". 

Harvesting nodes for materials or killing easy mobs for faction so that I can make an item that will make my character more powerful or allow her to use a vendor that currently won't trade with her  - these are classic farming activities. Running the same dungeon over and over to kill a boss who may, but most likely will not, drop a piece of gear I need to raise an arbitrary statistic on a specific slot by a small amount so she can edge a step closer to passing a gear check to enter another grade of the same dungeon and begin the process all over again is a classic grind.

Farming and Flying

There is no natural law that says spending time on one of these activities is morally superior to the other. It's all pixels as the saying goes. Some people absolutely loathe harvesting or faction grinding, seeing it as busy-work of the worst possible kind. I'm not attempting to place any of these essentially frivolous ways of passing the time into any kind of hierarchy of value.

What I am saying is that, while there may not be any extrinsic difference in worth between grinding or farming, there is a difference nonetheless. That difference is Agency.

When you farm you have complete control. It's a pick-up and drop activity. You can start it when the mood takes you and jack it in when you get bored. No-one is relying on you to hit one more Ancient Wood node or kill one more Corrupt Guard. No-one, that is, but you.

What's more, farming generally allows you to be as social as you wish. You can chat on all your channels, with your guild, your friends, randoms in zone, while keeping the mats or the faction flowing. By contrast, for all, its supposed social benefits, grinding, at least in its modern LFG/LFR form, has become a soulless, mechanical, silent drudge. If you're lucky.

The invention of Dailies muddied the distinction between grind and farm and between agency and obedience. Dailies were introduced, in part, to counter discontent with the perceived "grind" of faction farming (see how confusing these terms are?). They replaced killing large numbers of creatures Faction A disliked in order to make that faction like you by doing a small number of tasks for Faction A instead.

Easy Dailies!

This approach, which caught on and replicated across the genre like a virus, offers an uncomfortable half-way house for Agency. You have a limited freedom over which Dailies to choose and when (or rather whether) to do them but they tend to offer a much smaller range of options to achieve the same result and they come with a timer that the old farms happily lacked.

You don't have to do your dailies every day but, hey, they're called "Dailies" for a reason, aren't they? Miss a day and feel yourself slipping behind. And that's also the innate problem with vertical progression for anyone who isn't wholly on board with a life of High Energy High Achievement as a preferred way of spending their leisure hours.

Story time. There was a brief period when I was at the cap in EverQuest. It wasn't even that brief: I'd been at the Velious cap of 60 since some point in the life of the following expansion, Shadows of Luclin. I reached the  increased level cap of 65 during the Planes of Power expansion in 2002. I remained there until the cap was raised to 70 in Omens of War two years later.

I played EQ for four expansions at the 65 cap. I had two max level characters, a Cleric and a Shadowknight. I didn't raid but I both healed and tanked regularly for full groups in at-cap content for a couple of years.

I also played umpteen lower level characters throughout the run. By and large I managed to retain a Low Energy approach even though much of the activity was nominally High Energy. The way I did that was by retaining the maximum possible amount of agency throughout.

I did the entire Bard Epic. I never even played a bard.

At that time Mrs Bhagpuss and I were in an active guild and we did a lot with them but our primary social resource was a cross-guild custom chat channel. This was started by a friend of the time with our encouragement and over a couple of years we used it to build a network of like-minded individuals.

We invited people who enjoyed running dungeons for the fun of it, not just to get specific drops. We were laid-back enough about it all that, generally, we wouldn't even need to use /random to determine who would get most items. People were added to the channel based on whether they were good company not on how well they played.

How good anyone's gear was didn't even get a look-in when we were handing out invites or picking groups, although we did end up with a couple of top tier raiders, who appreciated the opportunity to kick back and relax once in awhile. As a Cleric I should have had my Epic. All clerics had to have their epic. But I didn't and it didn't matter.

Epic Quests were on the list of things I didn't fancy much, like raiding and getting flagged for the higher Planes, so I passed. Ironically, I did take part in several, but only as one of the party or raid helping someone else to get their Epic weapon.

I even once tanked Trakanon (the relatively easy triggered version) for a friend's Bard epic, probably the highlight of my limited tanking career but the only Epic I ever completed on my own behalf was the famously short and simple (relatively speaking) Beastlord version.

Another day, another Epic.

That was years later on another server and by then I was high enough level to solo most of it. Another Low Energy option - wait it out. Meanwhile, back in the PoP era, my capped characters opted out of the gear grind and yet were able to enjoy a full and varied palette of max-level content for a couple of years until EQ2 came along and derailed the train.

 At the beginning of my reply to Aywren I claimed "I think it is, both by definition and by design, impossible to have Low Energy fun *and* remain competitive in the endgame of a vertical progression MMO – especially one that uses a subscription-based payment model". The key word in that sentence is *and*.

If your goal is to live a relaxed, low energy life at the cap of an MMO designed around vertical progression you have to accept that you will not be competitive. You won't have the best gear. Your iLevel or equivalent will be sub-optimal. You won't be top of any ladders, meters or leader boards. You will, in the estimation of some, be coasting. You may feel your more driven friends are carrying you and they may be.

This is fine. You don't need to be competitive. You merely need to be competent. As Jeromai says "Priorities shift so that it’s no longer mission critical to be considered best of the best… “Good enough” will do". And "good enough " is by definition good enough. Your friends, if they are your friends, will be willing, happy even, to take some of the weight but that doesn't mean you need to be a burden.

Venril Sathir - is that the Druid Epic? It's all just a blur.

I was a good healer as a cleric in those days. I didn't have my Epic and my gear wasn't cutting edge but I knew what to cast, when and on whom, I didn't panic in a crisis and I kept people up when they might have gone down. My cleric was a first pick when groups were being made, partly because back then all groups wanted a cleric, but also because I was a good team player and because I was "good enough".

As a low energy gamer playing for relaxation and fun at the cap it is, in my opinion and from my experience, essential to be "good enough" while taking things seriously but not too seriously. You are there to enjoy yourself. If you find that, for whatever reason, that's not happening then it's time to make a polite excuse and leave.

If you can hold on to some agency you can enjoy life at the cap as much as you enjoyed the ride that took you there. Some MMOs, like GW2, make that a much, much easier thing to do but if it can be done in classic EQ then it can be done anywhere. Even FFXIV.

I look forward to hearing how Aywren squares that circle.