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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or I thought I did...

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

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

 

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

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

It also explains the new version is

 "Designed for New Players (Not Veterans)" 

 because 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Stars On Saturday Night

Here's another post about the Stars Reach pre-alpha, which is ongoing, although with the Kickstarter close to revealing its secrets, this already feels like the end of an era. There was a four-hour test for everyone on Saturday, including all the people who got invites off the back of "following" the fundraiser. Naturally, I was barely able to manage even an hour.

I don't want to go on and on about it (No, really...) but it has been very instructive for me to discover exactly how little control I have over my own time these days. The Stars Reach testing program has been almost entirely responsible for making that very clear indeed. Before I signed up and got in, I hadn't really noticed how far gaming had slipped down my list of priorities. 

There's so rarely anything in my gaming schedule that's in any way time-sensitive on a scale beyond "I suppose I'd better log in sometime in the next six weeks", I don't generally notice that it's a lot more difficult than it used to be find a clear hour or two for uninterrupted play. I was aware I'd not been playing as much as I used to but until these tests I'd assumed that was through choice. Now I'm not so sure.

These days, just about everything takes precedence over games, anything from eating meals to writing blog posts to watching broadcast TV shows as they go out, all things that would definitely not have pushed gaming to the back of the queue a few years ago. The biggest change by far, though, is having a dog in the house, particularly one who has her most active, social phase in the evening. It makes sitting down to play an uninterrupted session of any game a very hit or miss prospect.

All of that I've complained about to the point of tedium in previous posts. Even I'm bored with repeating it and I love talking about myself, as must be all too obvious from the long history of this blog. I mention it once again mostly to add weight to the rest of what I have to say about the testing program and my further involvement with it.

We are currently in an extremely early testing phase. It's pre-alpha. There is no permanence and no suggestion that there should be. There is also no game to play although that's less of an issue. Even without my well-documented personal issues over the awkward timing of the tests (It would suit me so much better if they mostly happened on weekday mornings or afternoons.) I'd still have reached the point now where it would be difficult for me to do anything of any great moment or purpose with the time I do have.

When I logged in on Saturday evening, the first thing I had to do was make a new character. My previous one and all the progress I'd made with her had been wiped. As I said, this is entirely proper at this stage of development and no-one, certainly not me, is complaining about it. It's not a question of complaining about having to start over. It's more about what that means in practical terms.

I've written about the opening stages of the game already - the tools you need to learn to use, the skills you need to raise, the materials you need to acquire and the devices you need to make. I've written about the housing possibilities and the combat and the exploration. 

With each new build there are new activities to try and refinements of the existing content to evaluate. The problem is that most of them require going through many of the same stages of progression as before. That in itself requires a certain mindset and personality and I'm not sure I have either. Even if the tests fell at the perfect time for me I'm not convinced I'd be willing to start over from scratch every three or four weeks and work my way back up to where I was before I could start testing whatever had been added.

As things stand, since I can usually only manage an hour or two each week, even if I was willing to go over and over the same ground, I would never be able to catch up. It saves me the worry of having to make a decision over whether I'm willing to try - it's just not possible.

Another odd side effect of these intermittent sessions, separated by days or sometimes weeks, is that I can't always tell with any certainty whether something has changed, not even how things look. On more than one occasion I've logged in and looked around and thought the graphics had improved. 

This Saturday I was convinced there'd been some kind of graphical upgrade. The world looked brighter and somehow fuller, the trees more leafy, the mountains more impressive. After a few minutes, though, I began to think maybe nothing had changed after all.

There's a strange phenomenon I've commented on before, whereby games that I haven't played for a while look much richer and more visually impressive when I come back after a time away. I noticed it most in Guild Wars 2, which I played daily for a decade. The only time I stopped for a while was when I went on holiday and each time I got back after a week or ten days away, when I logged in the whole game seemed to be in stereoscopic 3D. 

Literally. It was freaky!

It was so visually arresting I found it disorienting. I felt dizzy just looking at the screen. It took me a couple of hours to get used to it but when I did I could see that absolutely nothing had changed except my perception. I suspect something similar, albeit less dramatic, happens every time I come back to Stars Reach after a week or more.

It's not just the visuals, either. My memory isn't good enough to remember what I was doing last time I played nor what I need to do next. It's not a case of just picking up and carrying on; I have to start re-learning the whole thing all over again, something made even slower and more difficult because many of the things I need to do may have changed.

That makes sending bug or feedback reports feel a bit iffy. I'm never sure if something's off in the game or whether it's just me. 

What I certainly could do, though, is send feedback about the things that I'm certain have been added or changed or removed. For instance, the new Tutorial. Since that comes right at the start, I had no trouble testing it on Saturday.

I didn't much like it but that was because I took against it from the start, when the game openly insulted me for using it. I very much did not like being addressed from the get-go as "Meatbag". I will be sending feedback on that next time I log in. I didn't do it at the time because I was fuming too much to be civil. 

Seriously, who thought it was a good idea? If it's meant to be funny it isn't. If it's meant to have some in-game lore implication, there'd need to be some actual in-game lore to support it and again there isn't. And even if there was, does anyone really think the opening of a tutorial is the place to start slinging even lore-appropriate insults at the newbies?

That put me in a really bad mood for the rest of the Tutorial, which was otherwise somewhat helpful. I did learn one new thing although two days later I couldn't tell you what it was. I just remember thinking "Oh, I didn't know that.."  The only other thing I can remember about the Tutorial now is that it was short.

Oh, there was one interesting thing that came up in passing. There's a line that begins "We have not yet granted you permission to use starfaring vessels..." Up to now there seems to have been very little space travel in this game about space travel, to the point where I wasn't sure any more if I'd misunderstood the basic concept. I had thought Stars Reach was going to be at least a little like Star Citizen or Elite: Dangerous in that there'd be ships and we'd fly them between stars. 

This one half-sentence doesn't necessarily suggest that's what's going to happen. For all I know the Servitors might just issue us with the equivalent of a space bus pass and we'll trundle around the galaxy in the back seats of some kind of space Greyhound. Even that would be better than clicking a pylon and appearing on an asteroid like we do now, I guess.

There were other changes. I didn't bother to place a camp but I see that now you have to use a consumable so the days of plonking down a camp whenever you feel like it are over. As Wilhelm mentioned in a post a while ago, the Grav Mesh recipe now requires different materials, one of which is a specific Tier 5 metal with anti-gravity properties. 

These and other, similar changes are all logical, for which I support them. In context of a live game with full permanence, they will also contribute to immersion and make the game-world feel more coherent and convincing. In a series of limited-time tests, though, they constitute another step up in how long it takes to get anything done and therefore how much more repetition you have to go through just to get back to where you were.

I stuck it out for just under an hour, almost all of which I spent surveying, mining and defending myself from the voracious wildlife. I am no more enthusiastic now than I ever was about the hyper-aggressive nature of the mobs or the mob density. There are far too many creatures for a starting zone and they're far too keen on attacking when not remotely threatened. Obviously the mechanics need testing but I'd have thought there could be a specific planet for that, not every damn place you ever want to do anything.

Again, I need to send feedback about this stuff in the game itself. Next time I log in for a test session I think I'll start by giving my feedback before I get on with trying to get anything done. I've been leaving it for the end up to now and somehow I never get around to it before either the test ends or I get interrupted and have to stop.

What I'm really looking forward to isn't the next test but the start of the Kickstarter campaign. I want to see what the pledges are and I want to see how the whole thing goes. I hope it goes well and the project funds. I plan on pledging although it won't be at more than a basic level. 

From a purely personal perspective, I would like to see Stars Reach move into a more open form of testing and then Early Access just so I can structure my own time with the game more effectively. As it is now, I spend a lot more time worrying about if and when I'm going to be able to play than I spend actually playing and when I do get to play there's not a lot I can do that I haven't done several times already. 

The wider question, whether Stars Reach is a game I'd want to play with any frequency once it has full persistence and live servers, remains unanswerable. What's available in the pre-alpha is so far from what's projected for the finished game. 

What I am able say is that I can't easily imagine playing any sandbox MMO for all that long or out of much more than curiosity. Most seem to focus on activities that feel too much like work and not even all that interesting work, at that. I think I'd have felt differently twenty or maybe even ten years ago but time moves on and we change. 

As must be evident from my recent posts about other games, I'm in a much more story-oriented phase right now and the stories I want to hear are well-constructed, professionally-written, entertainingly performed narratives, not improvised gestalts. 

Maybe that will change. I'm not closing any doors. Right now, though,I'm content to sit back and watch the show.

Throne And Liberty: First Impressions (Intro and Tutorial)

Another day, another game. Will it never end?

Today's entry in the Big Summer Game Lottery is the long, long awaited Throne and Liberty, the latest spin-off from the Lineage universe, published in the West by Amazon and available for free through Steam. 

The game went into open beta yesterday at six in the evening. Where I live, that is. It was a global launch so it went Live at the same time where you live but your clock said something different. Unless you also live where I live, of course. Are you in my house? You better not be! 

I was eating quiche and watching Pointless at the time (If you ever needed proof of my lack of machismo, which I very much doubt, well there you go.) so I missed the very start but I was in and making my character by seven o' clock.

Steam tells me I played for eighty-five minutes. I'd guess about fifteen of those went on making the character. Could easily have been the whole hour and twenty five and might well have been, had this been an actual launch. For a beta test lasting five days, though, I think even fifteen minutes fiddling with sliders to get the eyebrows just right is probably too much. 

Where's the slider for Windswept?

Here's an idea for a blog. Or a YouTube channel. Or maybe a TikTok... what do they call it on TikTok? A series where you go into character creation in various games and make the same character every time - or try to. Has anyone done that yet? If not, I call dibs.

This time around I actually tried not to make exactly the same character I always make. As you can see from the screenshots, I didn't entirely succeed although I can see the differences. There is a problem with drifting too far from the familiar when creating a character, though, which is that if I make a character that doesn't feel familiar enough, I don't want to play them. 

In this case, I managed to come up with one who felt a little different - more hard-edged around the jaw-line, a little stubborn perhaps - but close enough to what I generally run with that I wouldn't feel uncomfortable playing her. I was particularly pleased with the hairstyle, the kind of fly-away, gamine-inflected, androgynous look you might have seen on the rhythm guitarist in a New Romantic band circa 1984.

Seperated at birth.

And then I played through the tutorial and found I'd basically made the first NPC you meet in the game. Honestly, it was freakishly disturbing how similar they were. They could be sisters, if they were the kind of unnerving siblings who choose to dress alike and do their hair and make-up in the same way.

And of course, my character's "sister" turns out to be the younger, better-looking one. Because of course she does. Oh well. At least I'll know better when the game goes Live in September. Always assuming I'll still be interested in playing it by then.

Finding out whether that's going to happen is kind of the point of joining in on the open beta. I'd say it would generally take more than an hour and a half to decide if I was likely to carry on with the game, although there have been plenty of times where I've made my choice in more like a minute and a half. In the case of Throne and liberty, though, eighty-five minutes has told me pretty much nothing.

You look strangely familiar, old man. Have we met before?

There are two reasons for that. Firstly, the huge majority of time not spent in character creation was taken up with watching melodramatic cut scenes or following an extremely on-rails, narrative-driven tutorial. I know it's pointless to complain about how unoriginal and formulaic these things are and certainly Throne and Liberty doesn't do the whole "introduce the mechanics and set the scene" thing any worse than the rest but coming off the back of one of the better introductions to a game I've seen in quite a while in Once Human, it really did feel like "Oh god, here we go again".

It was interesting to have full cursor control and a clickable hot-bar for a change. The main problem was the hot-bar coming pre-loaded with icons that meant nothing at all. 

Even that might not have been too bad if there'd been some breathing space to go through them all to find out what they did but no chance of that. It's all Go! Go! Go! with people yelling at you about how urgent it all is and things trying to kill you all the time and finally a big boss fight that naturally turns out to be scripted so you lose anyway, at which point you realize there was no hurry and you could have taken your time but now it's too late because the fighting's over and what your hot keys do doesn't matter any more.

At least I didn't have any trouble following the instructions or the plot. Translation at this early stage seems fine, if no better than that, as does the voice acting, although it doesn't give me confidence when the voiceover and the text don't match in the very first cut scene. Either we're Starborn or we're Star Children. Make your mind up!

Every F2P needs a few whales.

Visually, the developers have pulled a clever trick in the introductory sequence, which I'm about to spoil. All the action for a quite a while takes place in a horrible, ugly, red and black hellscape that looks like it was inspired by heavy-metal album covers from the 1980s. It was starting to get on my nerves when everything took a sudden and unexpected turn as my character emerged from the underworld into a vast, open landscape filled with light and color. 

It's a great set-piece moment. There's even a fricken' sky whale taking up most of the field of view. We've moved from Iron Maiden to Magnum with the Rodney Matthews covers. (Is that helping you to picture the scene? No, I thought not.)

From then on the game looks great. I could see a world I was definitely interested in exploring. If only I get there. Which I could not.

The tutorial, as far as I got, takes place in a single-player instance. After about three-quarters of an hour in there, I finally got to the point where it looked as though I was going to be sent into the gameworld proper, the shared space that makes the whole thing an MMORPG. 

This is Helpie. And here was I, thinking post-modernism was dead...

I was standing on top of a cliff with the endearingly geeky NPC my ersatz sister hand had handed me on to a while back, when he asked me to pet his familar on the head. Apparently that was going to make me glide like never before. I'm guessing it's a line that works for him...

It sure didn't work for me. I tried half a dozen times. Mostly the game just hung and then disconnected. Eventually, the cut scene started and I got to see my character throw herself off the cliff and rise up, flying like a superhero with her arms stretched out ahead of her until...

Nothing. Literally nothing. A blank, grey screen. I know there ought to have been more to look at because the voiceover carried on talking, describing things that weren't there. Then, after a minute or two, the server lost conection and dumped me back at login. 

Skip this amazing scene? I don't think so!

I tried once more but the next time I didn't even get off the cliff so I gave up. I'm assuming the servers for the multiplayer part of the game were under such load they'd stopped letting anyone else join. I'd picked one on the US East Coast but my ping had been excellent throughout the instanced part so I'm confident it wasn't anything at my end. 

By then it was time to take Beryl out for her evening walk and when I got back I wanted to play Once Human so that was it for the Throne and Liberty beta for the night. I'll try again today, when everyone's had time to get further into the game and when most of the Americas are still either asleep or at work. 

I feel I owe it to the game to get as far as the starting city, at least. That said, I'm really not feeling the need for yet another MMORPG right now. Maybe by late September, when T&L goes live, I'll be interested. Or maybe when I get into the actual game as opposed to the solo, instanced tutorial, I'll get invested and start counting the days until I can play the game for real. 

Kinda doubting it just now but we'll see...

Once Again Human

As previously noted, the summer of '24 is going to go down in MMO history as one of the busiest ever. There's so much going on it's hard to keep up and I certainly haven't helped myself by buying a highly addictive offline game in the Steam Summer Sale. 

Luckily, one of the good things about wishlisting forthcoming titles on Steam is Valve sending you an email when they go live. I received my notification that Once Human was "now available" at 9.48 last night, twelve minutes before the global launch at 10PM UK time. I guess you could argue the game was available already since you'd been able to download it for a while by then. 

I'd already done that. I was sitting there, waiting for the servers to come up. It wasn't that I'd remembered 9th of July was launch day. I'd just happened to notice something about it in one of my news feeds that afternoon., when my first thought wasn't "Yay! I get to play a great game today!", which is what it ought to have been, but something more along the lines of  "Oh crap! I forgot about that one. How the hell am I going to fit it in?"

"Somehow" has to be the answer. As has been very plain in all the posts I've written about it, I really like Once Human. The main reason I backed off and didn't bother much with the later playtests and the open beta is that I'd already played something in excess of thirty hours in beta and I was wary of burning out before I got started on the real thing.

There's always the disturbing possibility that, no matter how much you think you're going to enjoy a game, when the time comes you'll find it just isn't grabbing you the way you thought it would. That's already happened to me twice this summer, with EverQuest II's Anashti Sul and Tarisland. I fully expected to put a significant amount of time into both of those but when the day came I just wasn't feeling it. I don't think I've logged into either of them more than twice since launch day.

I'm very pleased to say that is very much not the case with Once Human. Ten o'clock was too late for me to do much last night. I'm old and I go to bed early. Still, I managed to spend fifty minutes making a character and getting through the opening section of the tutorial. Then this morning I played for another hour and a half until I'd finished the instanced introduction and made my way across the open world to Deadville, the starting town. 

The only reason I'm not playing right now is that I wanted to write this post covering some of what I'd done so far, while it was fresh in my mind. I'm not going to rehash what I said about the opening of the game back before Christmas, other than to comment on how interesting it is - to me, at least - that I seem to have made almost exactly the same character again. 

Character Creation in Once Human is immensely detailed and sophisticated. There's absolutely no need for me to have ended up with someone virtually identical to who I made six months ago. That's entirely on me. I definitely have a type when it comes to human characters in games and it's a waste of time pretending I don't.

Other than that, the main thing I wanted to talk about is how easy it is to get drawn along by the narrative like a donkey following a carrot hanging off a stick attached to the straw hat the farmer just plonked on his head and how that's probably not the smartest thing a player could do in this or any game. I did exactly that the last three times I went through the opening stages of the tutorial but for some reason, probably because I knew it was "for real", this time I didn't.

There were two reasons why I behaved differently the fourth time around. The first and most obvious is that it was the fourth time. It's almost like repeated exposure had innoculated me against the tutorial's charms. 

Once Human has one of the strongest opening sequences I can remember. It's compelling. Getting caught up in the unfolding narrative, doing what the game tells you to do, feels not just natural but necessary. Until today, I hadn't even questioned it. I'd talked to all the ghosts, picked up all the things, killed all the monsters and when it was time to leave, I left.

What I hadn't realised was that I didn't have to leave. Not right away.

The second half of the introduction takes place in a pocket dimension, an instance you have entirely to yourself. Once Human is a true MMO so that's not a situation that's going to continue for long. If you follow orders, it'll probably take you maybe ten or fifteen minutes, even if you read all of the quest dialog. Then you'll be out in the world with everyone else.

I spent a lot longer than that in there this morning. I found plenty to see and do that the tutorial doesn't tell you about. The part of the pocket dimension the game asks you to pay attention to is very small but the whole thing is huge. It's a sizeable chunk of the same environment you'll end up sharing with up to four thousand other players, the capacity of a Once Human server, but for as long as you can resist the temptation to join them, you'll have this piece of real estate all to yourself.

Chances are you won't even think of hanging around. The plot tells you there's a Big Bad coming and you'd better hurry up and stop it. There's a terrific sense of urgency but it's illusionary. There's no timer ticking and no need to hurry at all. The fight doesn't even start until you press a big button marked "Fight". Yes, literally.

If you hold off on that you can go exploring. And, more importantly, scavenging. The pocket dimension comes fully equipped, not just with trees and rocks and water, all of which the tutorial has you gather so you can learn the mechanics, but with numerous abandoned buildings and vehicles, filled with a wide range of materials and resources, all of which you're going to need later.

Of course, you can and will pick these up by the thousands in  normal play but by then a hundred different mobs will be trying to kill you and a dozen players may be after the same nodes. Why not fill your bags now, when there's no-one around but you and a few dozen harmless deer?

Or that's what I thought until an alligator waddled up to me and try to bite my leg off. A Level Five alligator. It was a pretty tough fight at Level One. I very nearly died. But not quite. 

There's no map available so I wasn't entirely convinced I'd seen everything there was to see and scavenged everything there was to scavenge. Visual range extends far into the distance but when you get to the edge of the explorable area the air goes all wobbly and hardens into an impenetrable barrier. Using that as a guide, I did my best to cover the whole area but it's very possible I missed something.

What I didn't miss were several lore items lying around on desks in derelict office buildings. There's an extensive collectible lore element to gameplay in Once Human and I don't know if these pieces are available outside the tutorial. I do know that in other games I've played in the past, that has not been the case, so if that's the sort of thing you're interested in, I wouldn't risk it. I'd go get them when you can. You might not get another chance.

The other reason I wasn't rushing to get through the story (Remember I said I had two.) was pants. I really wanted some this time.

One of the things people tended to notice about Once Human back in beta was the way that, if you made a female-appearing character (The game doesn't actually name genders in character creation.) you got clothing in the tutorial for every equippable body part except your legs. From memory, you don't actually get given a pair of pants until something crazy like Level 5. I'm guessing male-appearing characters don't get pants early either but oddly I can't recall seeing so many screenshots of that.

What I do remember are lots of shots of shapely backsides in skimpy leotards, even when the rest of the wearer was primly covered in camoflage gear. Comments were made and not just on this blog.

On my second beta run I quickly worked out you could craft
yourself some strides long before the tutorial told you how to do it but that was still when you got into the world with everyone else. This time I thought I might try to cover myself up before anyone got a peek.

And of course you can. It's very easy. The tutorial already has you building a tent and a tent comes with a basic crafting station. The tutorial only tells you to make some clean water and a crossbow but all the other starter recipes are there. If you can find the materials, you can make any of them

I had no difficulty finding the necessary mats to craft myself a pair of Rustic Pants. I felt a lot more comfortable and confident once I put them on, which is probably why I went straight to the "Fight" button and pressed it. In retrospect, I might have hung around the pocket dimension a little longer. I'm sure there were some more things there I missed.

The big fight itself was extremely easy. I'm not sure if that's because I've done it several times before or because they've made it easier or because I was fully fed, hydrated and dressed this time. Probably all of those. Whatever the reason, the walking phone mast fell over long before it got close and the ground troops supposedly supporting it never showed up at all. The visuals were great but the threat was purely imaginary. 

Back in the first beta, all I had was a handgun. Small-bore bullets put the zombies down fast enough but didn't make much of a dent in the big guy. To kill him I had to get knocked out, revive, find a gatling gun that happened to be lying about and use that to kill the monster. 

This time I had a crossbow the game had told me to make and all I had to do was fire it a few times in the general direction of the danger, which was over before it really got started. Whether that's an improvement is a matter of taste, I guess. I've had the advantage of doing it both ways now and I prefer the easy version but then don't I always?

After that it was through the door in the sky and freefall to earth, hanging onto the feet of an eagle. Just another day in MMOdom, in other words, especially since, of course, I have partial amnesia too. 

Well, my character does. I don't. Fortunately, I remember plenty about my many hours in beta, which is why this time I didn't follow the game's instructions to make a base. Instead, I thought about where I wanted to live and decided I'd like a nice beach-front property close to all the amenities so I jogged off to find a good spot.

Unfortunately for me, just around then I had the call to go take Beryl out for her walk so I settled for heading to Deadwood and camping there. That gave me the chance to collect my mail, which included a bunch of compensatory rewards for various launch-day misdemeanors and mishaps. 

Among those were eight "Seasonal Loot Crates", all of which I immediately opened. Some of them had boring old consumables but several contained new emotes and one had a mask. A really ugly mask but even so, nice to have.

If I was playing on the same account I created for beta, I believe I'd have been entitled to a few more freebies. I thought long and hard about that but in the end I decided I'd rather have the convenience of Steam than whatever they were handing out. 

Once Human is a reasonable-sized hit on Steam right now. As I write this at half-past four on a Wednesday afternoon, there are just under 125,000 players in the game. That, of course is only on Steam. The game is also available on the Epic Store and it has its own Netease launcher, which was the default for most of the betas, meaning a lot of people are probably using that to log in, especially if they care more for their beta rewards than I do. 

In due course (The estimated date is sometime in September.) the game will also come to Android and iOS. It seems safe to say that it's going to be quite a big deal for a while.

I think it deserves to be. It's very good. I have some questions and reservations about the Season format, details of which are beginning to come clear but which I still don't entirely understand. Those will, no doubt, be answered in due course. 

For now, though, I'm just going to dig in and enjoy a game I've been looking forward to playing for a while and which, for once, I find myself still excited to play now it's actually here.

On A Journey

There's been a lot going on Chez Bhagpuss recently, one way and another so I haven't been able to put anything substantial together for a while. I don't want to miss my regular cadence so I'm going to keep tossing stuff up as I can but posts might get a little random. Fair warning. 

Also, really, would anyone have noticed if I hadn't said anything?

Today's little pleasure is a bounce off a post by Aywren about a game I hadn't heard of, called AFK Journey. That, I have to say, is not an inspiring name for any game but Aywren made it sound pretty interesting, the screenshots in her post looked pretty and it seemed like it might make a possible replacement for the recently-shuttered Noah's Heart, so I downloaded it and gave it a try.

The first thing I'd say about it is that it's absolutely gorgeous to look at. I spent more time staring at the pictures and admiring the art than I did playing the game. I don't really need to describe it because the look comes over well in screenshots and I took a few of those.

Secondly, the writing isn't at all bad. As Aywren mentioned, the plot isn't anything new but the prose is sprightly, the dialog sparkles and the characters have plenty of personality. It's a fun read, although reading is optional because all dialog is also fully voiced and the voice acting is convincing and enjoyable to listen to. I didn't skip ahead once, which is always a recommendation.

As for gameplay, I played for an hour or so, enjoying the view and the chat. Other than that, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

Most of what I saw seemed to be an extended tutorial but it didn't teach me anything much beyond how to use the virtual joystick to move. AFK Journey is a cross-platform title but it was clearly designed with Mobile in mind. Few concessions seem to have been made to convert it to a format familiar to PC players.

During the tutorial, messages kept popping up telling me to click on things so I clicked where I was told and on we went. Unfortunately, I rarely had much of an idea why I was clicking ,so when it came time to do something on my own I was often none the wiser.

Following the main storyline had me traveling through the world in three-quarter perspective, stopping mostly talk to people, which seemed straightforward enough. Coins popped into my bag occasionally for no reason I could fathom but who complains about free money? As I trotted through the delightful, if sadly fire-ravaged countryside, there were allies to gather, fires to put out (of course.) and baddies to fight (Or were they?) At no point did I feel remotely in control of any of it.

After a while, I worked out how to auto-run to the next quest objective, something I would have appreciated if I hadn't been able to see chests in the hedgerows just waiting to be opened or teleport stones just waiting to be added to my map. If I allowed the game to whisk me on to my next appointment, it ran me straight past all of them, so I kept jumping off auto-run to go grab loot or open a waystone. Then I'd get into random encounters and fights with bandits and wildlife so in the end I decided it would be easier to do my own navigating.

Fights were frequent and incomprehensible. There can be up to five of you in the team and any number of opponents and if you click some icons on the right of the screen, little pointers appear over peoples' heads. What they mean, I have no idea. Luckily, there's one button you can press that seems to make everyone sort themselves out and get on with it so I just used that every time and sat back to watch.

I'm one hundred per cent sure that's not how it's meant to work. I'm certain there are tactical elements you're supposed to be concerning yourself with, if only because the whole point of gacha games is to build teams and swap your cards in and out for maximum effect. Usually it's quite clear how you do that. Not this time. Or not to me, at any rate.

That said, the game does get off to a fairly steady and manageable start. After a while, though, the windows and prompts and suggestions begin and then it's everyone for themselves. 

Games of this kind generally have a ridiculous range of features, mini-games, rewards and gimmicks. AFK Journey is no exception. I generally do anything that's quick, easy and gives you free stuff and or that I find fun in and of itself. After that, I ignore the rest but in this case I ignored everything because once again I was having difficulty figuring out what I was supposed to do.

I realize all of that would probably work itself out over time. I've played plenty of games that confused the hell out of me to begin with but which turned out, in the end, to be much simpler than they seemed. Normally, I'd be happy to carry on for a few more sessions; see if the fog lifted; let the shape of the game make itself known.

In this case, I'm not sure I'm going to stick around that long. The game has potential but there are a lot of games with potential out there, some of them at least as pretty or well-written and many a lot more comfortable for me to play. 

Still, I have AFK Journey installed now and I don't not like it... We'll have to see how it goes from here.

Seventy-Five Not So Stressful Minutes With Nightingale

The most stressful part had nothing to do with the game. It was waiting for Beryl to bounce in, barking and begging to play, too. With her with her ball on a string, that is. She's bright for a dog and dexterous with her paws but she's not quite up to playing video games just yet.

The stress test began at six PM, local time. It was scheduled to end at nine, landing squarely in the slot normally reserved for canine recreation. I had to ask Mrs. Bhagpuss to keep Beryl entertained so I could get into the game at least long enough to take a few screenshots and see enough to write a post about it, obviously the most important part of the whole excercise, if not the whole point of being there at all.

In the event, I managed more than twice as long as I expected, a fifty minute session followed by another twenty-five minutes a little later. Neither was stressful at all, although I did get off to kind of a rough start, dead on a rock a couple of minutes after I began.

I'd climbed onto the rock to get away from a pack of wild pigs that chased me out of the forest onto the shoreline before I'd even had a chance to work out how to fight back. I had a torch in my hand, which turned out to be a ranged weapon. I threw it at them again and again but they didn't seem bothered. I didn't have "killed by a boar" on my Nightingale bingo card but that's what I got, anyway. Might as well have been playing WoW.

Backing up a bit, the notification, download and login processes all went swimmingly. The client, which comes in somewhere in the low sixty gigabyte range, took about half an hour or so to download and install. Developers Inflexion Games changed their minds at the last minute and let everyone in all at once instead of staggering access so the moment the Play button lit up, I was in.

They also extended the playtest from three hours to eight because it was going so well. Is going so well, I ought to say. It still has four hours to run as I type this.

Before the test began, Inflexion sent out a good deal of information about what to expect. Characters would start at the equivalent of ten hours old. No, you wouldn't begin as a newborn babe. That would be too weird, even for this game. You'd be given a character set up as if they'd already played for around ten hours.

That meant skipping the entire tutorial, which sounds fine in theory, especially when you consider the test was only supposed to last three hours. In practice, it meant I had absolutely no clue how to do anything once I got past character creation and even there I was flummoxed at times. I used to despise tutorials but of late I've started to see the merit in them. In media res is one thing but being dropped into the deep end to see if you can swim doesn't sem to have the same thrill it once did.

Speaking of character creation, I liked it. What I saw of it. Again, time pressure meant I rushed through the options faster than I would have liked. There seemed to be plenty of choice, lots of sliders, some bits that weren't finished yet and a few parts I plain could not understand. Also a lot of backstory that meant reading lengthy paragraphs of descriptive prose, something I'd normally welcome but in this instance, under pressure of time, reluctantly had to skim or skip.

Some parts I just didn't get at all. There's a whole section where you get to pick your ancestors, going back three generations on each side of the family tree. Then you get to decide which of them had the most influence on you. It might have come with an explanation but it was taking far too long so I picked a bunch of people at random, jiggled the pointer and left it at that.

There were some other options I don't remember seeing in other games. There's a surprising focus on teeth. You can have them metal or decaying or crooked. Why you'd want to is another question.

I left my teeth as they came, along with my eyebrows and my hairstyle. I added a tuch of blusher and a little glitter to my cheekbones, declined the offer of lipstick and off we went to the Fae Realm.

Or possibly the Abeyance Forest Realm. They may or may not be the same thing. It's a forest, whatever they call it, and the first person you meet there is Puck. Of course it is. I studied Shakespeare both at school and at University; no-one ever suggested I read A Midsummer Night's Dream. Not once. And yet here we are...

From the way they talked, I got the feeling Puck and my character had met before. In the missing Tutorial, probably. He gave me a bunch of advice or his voice actor did, none of which I really took on board. He also turned out to be the only NPC I met who could speak out loud. I ended up meeting several more characters with dialog but none of them were voiced.

There was a heap of stuff piled up behind Puck, including several chests stuffed with crafting materials. I was fully geared, kitted out in adventuring kit with gathering tools and more food than I could eat in a week. None of it helped much. If anything, the opposite. At times I felt I'd have been less confused with a rusty sword and a cloth tunic.

The only hint of what to do next was a single instruction - build a cairn and claim my estate. I died three times before I figured out how to place the cairn. After a lot of trial, error, luck and random button pressing I got it figured out, at which point I realised I was looking at two of them. The devs had handily put one down for me already. I just didn't recognize it for what it was.

Even after I had my cairn in ghost-form, I couldn't find the rocks to make it real. I ran around, died another time or two, found some rocks, put them in the cairn and completed my only task. Up popped Puck again to give me something else to do but I'd had enough of him so I went exploring. 

I died a couple more times before I learned you can just fight with the same tools you use to chop wood or mine ore. That does make sense. I mean, a pickaxe to the head is a pickaxe to the head, whatever it says on the handle.

Once I had that down, fights were surprisingly easy. I clubbed many wolves to death and had my revenge on the pesky pigs. I guessed I could skin and butcher them as you can in New World and I was right. The knife magically appeared in my hand at need and there I was with a bunch more stuff I didn't know what to do with.

I also battered a few zombie-like creatures that swarmed out of a strange, serpentine structure I went to investigate. Pro tip: anything that looks remotely interesting in Nightingale probably has something hiding inside that wants to rip your head off. It happened literally every time I went to look at anything.

It seems remarkably easy to get killed in Nightingale, even on the Easy setting, which is what I chose. It's not just the wildlife. It's the weather. This is, I'm pretty sure, the first game I've ever played where hail is a weather condition, not a greeting. What's more, it's the old "hailstones the size of golf-balls" as beloved by lazy sub-editors everywhere and they fricken' hurt!

There's falling damage, naturally, which kicks in when you jump off anything much higher than a footstool and I'm sure you can drown if you're dumb enough to go for a swim, which for once, quite surprisingly, I was not. By survival game standards it felt quite harsh but then I had no idea what I was doing. I bet if I'd been through a tutorial I would have had a much better time of it.

In the end, though, this was a stress test, not a play test and on that level, from my end at least, it performed admirably. I had no lag of any kind, no disconnections, no trouble getting in and out of the game. Everything felt very smooth. There are clearly parts of the game as yet unfinished but it seems fine for the first step into Early Access.

I could go further into what I liked and disliked about my brief introduction to the world of Nightingale but it hardly seems appropriate - or necessary. In a matter of weeks I'll be able to play for as long as I like. There'll be plenty of time to write about it in detail then.

And I will because I will most definitely be buying the game. I already intended to and what I saw in my hour and a quarter there more than met my expectations. I look forward to starting from the beginning and finding out what I was doing wrong.

For once, I'm even looking forward to the Tutorial.