Here's a problem I have with blogging. It's quite specific to me, I think,
but do please chime in if it affects you, too.
I seem to play quite a lot of games no-one else in the blogosphere is playing
at the moment. Sometimes it seems like I'm playing games hardly
anyone else is playing. If they are, they certainly aren't writing
about them.
Quite often, they're new games. They're likely to be either MMORPGs or,
increasingly these days, the plethora of survival/MMO/cosy hybrids that seem
to be popping up all over. It reminds me of the WoW clone era, except
it seems to be going a lot better, so far.
The games that make it are no trouble to post about. Palia, for
example, despite a bit of side-eye for perhaps opening its doors to the world
before it was fully prepared, has generally been well-received. Lots of people
tried it, plenty are still playing and some of them are
writing
about their experiences.
There are also plenty of guides to Palia. If I was writing a post and wanted
to look something up or fact-check it before I hit publish, there'd be no
problem.
Well, actually, there might. That's down to the way I like to play my games. I
straddle an uncomfortable fence between not wanting to spoil my own fun and
not wanting to waste more time than I have to, which means I tend to try and
work out how to do things on my own before looking them up, something I try to
do only if and when I get stuck.
I find that works very well for me in terms of engagement and immersion. One
of the big reasons I play so many new games isn't that I have a butterfly mind
and can't settle anywhere; it's that a huge part of the fun for me is
uncovering and understanding the systems and mechanics that make the games
work.
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I kind of think there has to be a way to cook more than one
sausage at a time but if so, I just don't know what it is.
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It's all part of being a primary Explorer archetype. I don't just want to
explore new worlds, I want to explore new systems and processes and as
something of an academic manqué I also want to compare and contrast what I
find with what I've seen elsewhere and maybe even draw some conclusions.
All of which is fine, when I do in fact understand what's going on. Often,
though, I really don't. I muddle along, making assumptions and playing the
game as I understand it, all the time not realising my understanding is
flawed.
It wouldn't matter so much if I wasn't continually committing my mistaken
impressions to print. It still doesn't matter a lot because almost no-one who
reads them will ever know they were mistakes. They'll never play the games to
find out for themselves I was wrong.
Nevertheless, I am conscious of the very slight chance that someone googling
for information on a game that no-one else is talking about might end up here
and leave with the mistaken belief they'd found a source of useful
information.
To be fair to myself, some of it is useful. The bits where I've gotten
it right, anyway. I don't do guides as a rule but I do include factual
information in reviews and tell stories that have descriptions of how I got
past obstacles that were preventing me making progress. Someone might find
some of it helpful.
Not if it's plain wrong, though. That's just annoying. I've done it a few
times myself, gone to some website that seemed very authorative and tried to
follow the advice there only to find it didn't work, either because something
in the game had changed since it was written or things had never worked that
way in the first place.
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I found this giant, stone ball you can roll around but I have no idea
why you'd want to. Treat it as a metaphor for this entire post.
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That's why I tend to caveat a lot of things I write with cautionary warnings
about my ignorance.The least I can do if I'm aware what I'm saying may not be
wholly accurate is to make that clear up front. Only, as I said, when it comes
to games no-one else is playing or writing about, that's not always as easy as
it should be. If you think you're right you're not going to think you might be
wrong. Or say so.
It's been a particular problem with Noah's Heart, a game about which
almost no-one seems to care but me. If you try to look up information about
even the most obvious parts of the game, like which are the Phantoms you
should be trying to five-star, an absolutely basic piece of data about any
Gacha game, you'll be lucky to find anything at all.
Only, naturally, I just did. In typical sod's law style, the last time I
checked I couldn't find anything more recent than last November but today I
found
this guide, written on August 15. Honestly, reading it does not fill me with confidence
about its accuracy but it's something, at least.
In general, though, I think my point holds. For smaller, less popular games,
the information available is both harder to find and harder to trust when you
do.
Dawnlands isn't quite as obscure as Noah's Heart. There's a fair amount of
traffic around the game. Almost all of it seems to come from the mobile side,
though, and not surprisingly it's mainly in the form of videos on
YouTube.
YouTube videos are really handy when you want to research something like how to
handle a boss fight. It's easier to understand and copy tactics and strategies
for something like that when you can watch someone doing it. When it comes to
things like how to plant and grow cotton, though, watching someone doing it for
a few minutes doesn't feel like the best use of your time. Especially when it
comes with
a rinky-dink backing track
and no commentary.
That video I embedded above, however, while it doesn't really explain all that
much, is immensely helpful in revealing some potential aspects of the building
systems I wasn't even aware existed.
Maybe I haven't just reached that part yet but nothing in the game itself has
introduced me to the concept of Blueprints or the Advanced building
techniques. Not that I plan on going to the extremes this guy has but it's as
well to be cognizant of the possibilities.
Even when the game does include instructions, I don't always follow them. I
tamed my horse when I was told but I never made the hitching post to tie him
up to because, as I said
in an earlier post, all you have to do is press "Y" and he appears right beside you.
Yesterday I got an achievement for something or other and when I claimed my
diamonds for doing it, I happened to notice that all I needed to round out the
whole section was to make that hitching post. So I made it and discovered it's
not just a decorative addition to your home, as I'd assumed, but the item that
provides functionality for your Mount collection.
Clicking on the hitching post opens the Mount interface, where you can see the
stats of your mounts, name them and swap between them. It also makes it clear,
if only by implication, that mounts vary in speed and robustness, so I've been
doing myself no favors by sticking loyally with the first one I happened
upon.
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I feel an unreasoning loyalty towards mounts that have their own
names. Naming them is almost always a mistake.
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There are horses in each of the biomes so it seems logical that they'd improve
in quality as the difficulty levels go up. Again, though, that's an
assumption. If I state it here as a fact, I'm doing anyone who reads this a
disservice. A quick Google on "Dawnlands mounts" brings up almost
nothing of value so the only way I'm going to know for sure is to go tame a
Plains horse for myself and compare it with my current Grasslands ride.
Once I've done that, if I write it up here in any kind of detail, as likely as
not it will be the only account available. I mean, if there was another I
wouldn't be doing it, would I? Whether whatever I say about it will be
comprehensive or even correct is another matter. It'll tell anyone who reads
it what I know about the topic but that may not be much.
For example, I thought I knew a fair bit about how the instant travel system
works. I wrote about it in some detail
in this post, where I also talk about mounts (And probably get most of that wrong, too.)
Here's how I thought it worked:
"As far as I can make out, there's a network of Teleport Beacons you
can find and, if necessary, cleanse of corruption so you can move between
them. The Teleport Beacons are very few and far between, which would be
highly restrictive if it wasn't for the fact that you can also teleport to
all kinds of other locations as well - any of the icons marked on the map,
in fact, which in practical terms means just about everywhere.
Unfortunately, teleporting to any of them requires a Teleportation Potion
every time. The potion is consumed on use and the only place I've found them
is on vendors in the Shelters. They're cheap but there's only one vendor in
each village, each vendor only has five potions to sell and they're never
restocked. If there's a recipe to craft them, I haven't found it yet."
Bits of that are correct but some extremely important aspects are flat-out
wrong. For a start, you do not need Teleport potions to travel between
Shelters, Activated Teleport Beacons or pretty much any of the large icons on
the map that represent some kind of portal or special event. All of those are
free and they have no cooldown, either, so free, instant map travel is widely
available.
I'm not going to try to be any more specific because there may be limitations
I don't know about. I really don't know exactly how it all works. What I do
know is that The key thing to remember is that when you click on any icon on
the map it will open a panel that tells you if you need a potion or not. If
there's a Teleport button and no picture of a potion next to it, travel is
free. How it took me so long to notice this is not a subject I wish to
discuss.
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My original plantation. It's three times the size now I know how to
port to and fro for free.
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This discovery, inevitably, made a huge difference to my gameplay. Before then,
I'd been spending long periods riding between locations, often finding myself
away from shelter at night and having to fight a lot of monsters I didn't want
to be fighting. I'd been ruing the lack of craftable teleport gates like they
have in Valheim, when in actuality the functionality was already baked into most
of the locations where I needed it, especially my house and all the vendors I
needed to visit.
Now I can just zap myself instantly between my home in the Grasslands Shelter
and the vendor in the Plains Shelter to buy seeds as and when I need them,
then back again to plant them in the garden I've laid out right down the main
street. It makes life much easier.
(And just to prove the point, since I wrote this post I've learned yet another very significant fact about teleportation options, which will now have to wait for yet another post I'm planning... None of which would have happened if this had been a game everyone else was playing, because someone would have put me straight in the comments weeks ago.)
Another feature I know a little about but don't even begin to understand fully
are trinkets and the tinkering station you can use to merge and change them.
I've just been throwing stuff in and pressing the button like we used to do in
the Mystic Forge in Guild Wars 2 and I've had a couple of
succeses.
I got some goggles that mark the position of animals on the mini-map and an
anchor that increases sailing speed but as
this video, by the same YouTube creator,
Kazeyo, shows, you can make a huge
range of much better trinkets.
The problem with the video is, it doesn't really explain very much about how to
control the process beyond merge blue trinkets to get purple ones. If there's a
way to control the outcome or get the effects you're after, it's not clear to me
what it is.
This is just the kind of thing that could be explained more helpfully in a
written guide. I'm not saying I'd want to write one but if I knew how the
whole thing worked I could at least give a few examples from experience that
might be of some help to somebody.
As must be clear, though, Dawnlands is a very complex game. They all bloody
are! That's both the joy and the terror of it. I played Chimeraland for
weeks and never really understood much of what I was doing. Noah's Heart is a
lot less complex and I've played it for a year but I still don't feel
confident to talk in detail aboout some of the systems it employs.
None of this is going to stop me writing about the games I play but I am going
to have to keep adding warnings that even if it sounds as if I know what I'm
talking about, I most probably don't. I'm more interested in keeping a record
for myself about what I've done and trying to make it entertaining for anyone
who happens to read it. Giving people useful tips on how to play the game
comes a distant third.
And if anyone can tell me what good "Accurate Time-Telling" is on a
trinket, I'd love to know. I've got two fob-watches that buff it and I have no
idea what it even is.