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.

Just Because I Have Nothing To Say About The Throne And Liberty Open Beta Doesn't Mean I'm Not Going To Say It Anyway...

So, here's everything I really know about Throne and Liberty...

Yeah. That much.

What I do know is that there's an open beta. It starts today, about an hour and a half from now, as I write. That's 18.00 London time. No, wait, make that a day and an hour and a half. It starts on Thursday, even if some online sources say Wednesday.

As I keep saying, this is turning out to be just about the busiest gaming summer I can remember. I'm not at all sure I'd have bothered with this one if it weren't for two things:

1. It's a mid-week start
2. It's on Steam

The first is very unusual. Since I went to working just two days a week, one of which is always Sunday and the other every other Saturday, just about every short-term alpha, beta, sneak peek or pop-up test has been largely inaccessible to me. 

Companies seem to like starting these things on a Friday afternoon and finishing them around midnight on Sunday, which means I'm lucky if I can fit in a couple of short sessions. This one is a full five days and I'm only working for one of them, so it seems almost rude to miss it.

The second is a lot more common but always makes a big difference. All I had to do was open the store page in Steam, press the "Request Access" button, which granted me permission instantly, then let Steam download and install the client. That lack of faff makes me willing to try out games I otherwise wouldn't bother with. It's not hard to see why everyone wants to get their game on Steam.

That said, I do find the relationship between Amazon and Steam somewhat odd. New World and Lost Ark are both "Amazon Games" in a manner of speaking, one being developed by the internet giant, the other being published by them. Throne and Liberty is the next big Amazon game (They hope...). 

As far as I can tell, all of them are on only available on PC via Steam. Given that Amazon has its own gaming portal, runs a proprietary cloud gaming platform and has one of the biggest server rental businesses in the world, it seems a bit strange that they don't want to host their games themselves.

I'm  not complaining, although a quick google search shows some people are. I'm a Steam convert now, with all the annoying intensity that implies. Increasingly, if it's not on Steam I'm not sure I'm interested.

I certainly wouldn't be interested in a 50GB download for a five-day beta if I didn't know I could clear the unwanted husk of the client off my hard drive with a single click when it's all over. Steam does make it exceptionally easy to add and remove games. I just pressed the button and let it all happen automatically while I played Once Human. 

When it was ready I tried to log in, just in case they'd done something clever like pre-enable character creation but no such luck. I was able to do a couple of basic things like calibrate the monitor, something I've never known to make a noticeable difference. I miss the good old in-game gamma sliders that actually worked.

One thing I hadn't come across before was the option to have the whole game "Voice Guided". That seems like a really excellent innovation although I'm not entirely convinced "hard of seeing" is the accepted terminology. I was tempted to leave it on to see how effective it was but I thought I'd probably better concentrate on the game itself rather than its accessibility credentials, at least at first.

The other notable choice I was able to make was between action combat and "a classic control mode with separated character and camera controls". I think that means what has come to be known as "WoW Style" but we'll see. 

I picked that one but as I was saying the other day in a comment somewhere, I'm starting to think that I've been boiled in the Action Combat pot long enough now to feel more comfortable with that style than with tab target and hot keys. I know I keep trying to dodge and roll in older games that don't allow it and it makes me mad when I can't... 

The two modes are hot-swappable anyway so it's not like it's a big decision.

Other than that, as I said, I know nothing. Oh, except that it has something to do with Lineage. But then I know nothing about Lineage either. 

Still, I managed to come up with several hundred words about it, somehow, and I haven't even logged in yet. I could wait until the doors open then play for a while so I'd have something of substance to offer but then I'd have to log out and write the damn post and that would kind of defeat the object.

I think I'll leave it here for now but no doubt I'll be back with some First Impressions in a day or two. 

Bet you can't wait.

Seasons, Single Characters And Security Issues: False Steps And Fixes For Once Human

Watching the reaction to the launch of Once Human on Steam has been very interesting. The game has been reasonably successful, cracking the top ten on the Steam chart, peaking just a shade under 150k concurrency. That puts it in Steam's Top Ten biggest launches this year. It's not Palworld but it's not bad.

Those numbers, while impressive, don't tell the full story. You don't have to play Once Human through Steam. You can use Netease's own portal or play through the Epic Games Store. Neither of those offer the same kind of access to population data as Steam but it's reasonable to assume the number of players there is substantial, too. 

It's probably fair, then, to call Once Human a hit. The launch was also very smooth by MMO standards, with the servers generally staying up and no wide-spread, game-breaking bugs requiring emergency patches. There was a minor issue with server lists not displaying correctly right at the start but that was fixed almost immediately.

Despite these indicators of success, the aggregate review rating on Steam is only "Mixed". More than half of the twelve thousand reviews are positive but there are a lot of naysayers and it seems most of them are unhappy with something other than gameplay or performance.

The three main areas of concern appear to be:

• The single character per account rule.
• Use of the Netease launcher.
• Confusion over the Seasons system

All of those issues have already been addressed by the developers, which does at least seem to have gained them a modicum of respect for responsivity but of course the damage has already been done. It remains to be seen whether newer reviews will shift the balance towards the positive. 

Of more interest to me than the reviews is the substantive value of the concerns and whether they could have been avoided in the first place.

Single Characters

I'm not sure how unusual it would be for an MMO to limit players to a single character per Steam account. I'd bet plenty of players only have a single character anyway and might not even notice. My guess it that it would be fairly standard only to allow one character per account per server but to pare that down to one character, period, would be very rare.

Still, I don't think even that would have caused quite so much uproar if Starry Games hadn't made the bizarre decision to make that one character undeletable. I'm sure plenty of players, who end up happily playing just the one character, go through a few that don't stick first. Being forced to carry on with whatever character you made on your first attempt does seem harsh.

It was always clear from the start that the intention was to allow multiple character creation eventually. but the uproar was sufficient to bring the date forward - really forward. Multiple character creation was enabled almost immediately, the same day the game launched.

The given reason for not having it in the game from the start is very revealing: 

"Our initial decision to close multiple-character creation was due to the imperfect experience of playing with multiple characters."

This seems to come up a lot in MMORPGs from both East and West. Developers make assumptions about what would be good for players without taking into consideration the implications for players' sense of agency. I'm sure it's true that limiting players to a single character would avoid a number of potentially awkward and unsatisfying experiences, not least for Customer Service, but going so far as to make it impossible to start over without making a whole, new Steam account seems like insanity.

I find myself oddly out of sync with the whole thing. A few years ago, I'd have been outraged to be limited to just the one character. These days I hardly ever make a second in any game. I suspect that if this change hadn't had so much publicity, I'd have been one of the players that never even noticed the restriction existed.

External Launcher

I must say, of the three major issues, this is the one I have by far the least sympathy with. Once Human is far from the only game I've played on Steam that requires use of an external portal or app of some kind. It's nothing new or strange.

In this case, the main objection seems to be the China connection. Because Netease is a Chinese company, a substantial number of Steam players seem to believe any software it might install on their computers is going to harvest their data and send it straight to the CCP.

And I guess it might, although what the CCP would want it for I have no idea. I suppose it depends what kind of data you might have on your PC...

I never really understand what the fuss is about with data gathering. Obviously, from my own perspective, having played dozens of imported games over the last few years, most of which have needed to install launchers to run, all my data must have been sent to Beijing and Seoul many times over. 

In the specific case of Once Human, I already played it directly through the NetEase launcher for both the betas I took part in. I'm hardly going to balk at letting Steam pass-through to the same launcher now.

Plenty of people feel differently, which is why the Once Human Team had to issue a lengthy clarification on the situation. Naturally, they make great play of their integrity and purpose when it comes to safeguarding data but they also completely deny that Steam (Or Epic.) players need to download or use the launcher at all:

"Players who play the game from Steam or Epic will NOT need to download or use the launcher."

Now, that does seem odd. I could have sworn I had to go through some kind of hand-over between Steam and the Netease launcher the first time I logged in. And if that wasn't the case, how come everyone was up in arms about it to begin with? 

Whatever the truth of it, my feeling is that for most gamers, the ship on data privacy probably sailed long, long ago. Most of us have probably clicked on all kinds of things we shouldn't have, just to get a first look at some game were were over-excited about. Any data we ever had has probably been all around the world many times over by now. If we really want to keep our data private, we'd almost certainly need to stop playing online games altogether.

Seasons

This is the one that really stumps me. I completely understand why people are confused and anxious about it. I've read all the avaialable information on the proposed Season system for Once Human, including the lengthy clarification released yesterday and I still have no clear idea what the heck it all means.

In fact, I found yesterday's "explanation" raised a lot more questions than it answered. If anything, I  feel more confused now about how it's all going to work than I did before I read it. 

The specific detail about which currencies and items will carry over between seasons is fine. that I can understand. What mystifies me is the underlying structure. I've read and re-read the details and I just can't visualise how the mechanics are going to work. Apparently, when a Season ends, you'll have a choice:

"Once a season concludes, you can embrace a new challenge by joining a different scenario or taking on your current one with renewed vigor."

At first I thought this meant you could just opt out of seasons altogether and carry on as you are, almost like not buying an expansion in an MMORPG, but now I think it means something quite different.

As far as I can tell, the worlds "Season" and "Scenario" have separate and distinct meanings in this context. I think they're saying you can opt out of new scenarios but you'll still have to join a new season. That's highly significant because a new Season is a reset. Everyone goes back to Level One and starts over fresh:

"In each new season, your character begins at Level 1, and all exploration progress on the World Map is reset. "

It looks as though there's no way to avoid having to begin again from scratch every six weeks (Or however long the season is. The first couple are six weeks long but later ones could be shorter or longer.) What you could do is replay the same content again by not opting into the new "Season Scenario", although quite why you'd want to do that I' not sure. It'd be be like playing WoW Classic in January 2005.

If my interpretation is correct, I'm not convinced the argument about not losing progress really stands up:

"We are aware that many players are concerned that their in-game progress will be reset in 6 weeks, but we are here to reassure you that this will NOT happen! "

That can only be true if you don't class gaining levels and opening up the map, including activating all the many instant travel nodes, as "progress". I'm not at all sure most players are going to agree with that definition.

My feeling, which I've seen expressed in a few places now, is that we're going to have to wait to see how all of this works in practice before we can be sure whether we like it or not. It does seem like quite a radical departure from the way most online games with "permanence" work. 

That's not to say it will turn out to be a bad idea. I think it's quite easy to imagine some considerable advantages to having a partial reset every so often, especially if it brings new explorable areas and storylines.

On the other hand, most MMOs manage to do that already without sending everyone back to the starting line. Whether this kind of leveling of the playing field is really necessary is unclear.

If it turns out a lot of players really don't like being set back in this way, then based on the speed of reaction so far, I'd guess we'll see a quick re-assessment by Starry/NetEase. By then, though, the game will have been out for a month and a half. Based on previous high-profile launches this year, that may already be too late for most people to care.

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.

A Tactical Choice

The Steam Summer Sale ends in a few days. Back when it started, I spent maybe an hour going through the offers. I spotted a number of decent bargains and no fewer than eighteen of the entries on my wishlist were on sale for anything up to seventy-five per cent off. Surely there had to be something I could buy?

Well, nope. Apparently there wasn't. I looked at everything, on and off the wishlist, trying to imagine myself playing any of them across the summer and I couldn't do it. I could see myself playing them at some point but I definitely didn't get the feeling that point would be any time soon.

That's the problem with sales. If you're not going to play a game tonight or tomorrow or next week or even next month, is there any point buying it today? 

I guess there could be. Games aren't perishable. They don't go off. You could, quite reasonably, buy a game in the summer with the intention of playing it in the autumn or the winter or next spring. If it seemed likely you might do that, and if the game was on sale right now at a good discount, it might even seem like a sensible thing to do.

Except that games on Steam go on sale all the time. Not only are there the big Summer and Winter sales, there are numerous publisher sales and themed events plus the perpetual drip drip drip of everyday discounts that just never stops. 

There's not even much of an argument in favor of nailing down a good discount when you see it, even on a game you're sure you'll play "one day", just in case it never comes up for sale at that price again. Game pricing doesn't work that way. Once the discounts begin, they tend to keep on coming and they have a habit of getting bigger as the game ages out of the market.

It's true that at some point the price might hit a floor and stop falling . It might well bounce around a bit between big sales. It's never going to go all the way back up. If you miss a bargain in one sale it doesn't matter; there may well be a better deal in the enxt.

It's a very different mechanism from what  I'm used to in the book trade. At work, over the years, I've frequently had to explain to bemused customers that the brand new books on sale at half-price aren't commercial disasters we're trying to get rid of - they're the most hotly-anticpated, keenly-selling successes of the moment. 

For some reason that still isn't entirely clear to me after the best part of thirty years in the business, very successful books are often at their cheapest on publication. If you want to buy a just-published novel at half price, don't hang about. The first couple of weeks is your beat bet for a bargain. You might be lucky and pick up the same book for half-price a year later, just before the paperback comes out, when booksellers will try to get rid of any final, few copies they might have lying around but chances are any that didn't sell will have been returned to the publishers by then.

Even less comprehensible is the way the better-known and more successful the author is, the bigger the
discount is likely to be. Regular, mid-range writers have to hope someone's willing to pay full price for their new book, even though it's had little publicity and there's not much demand. Famous authors latest efforts get piled high next to the tills at half-price on the day of publication.

It's not quite as ruthless as it was a few years ago. Reading is hot right now and has been at least since Tik-Tok became a thing. A lot more books go undiscounted. Even so, rule of thumb remains get in quick if you want to buy cheap. If there isn't any money off when the book comes out, it's unlikely there'll be a discount later. (Caveat: that's how it is in the UK. I have no idea if it works like that in other territories...)

With games, it's pretty much the exact opposite. Wait long enough and you'll be able to pick up not just the game you wanted but all the DLC, for a fraction of the original cost. You might even get it all neatly packaged up together in an Ultimate Edition, assuming the game was successful to merit one.

With all of that in mind, I'd about reached the stage of writing off the Steam Summer Sale altogether. I just couldn't justify buying anything, even for cheap. (I almost stumped up for Penny Larceny but once again the game fell at the last hurdle; I do want to play it but I don't want to play it now. Also, it's only £9.99 full price. A 30% discount taking it down to £6.99 barely makes a difference. Sometimes full price is already low enough that a discount just isn't much of an incentive.)

And then last night I bought a game after all!

It wasn't on a whim but it was an almost-instantaneous decision. The moment I saw the discount I didn't hesitate. So what was it and why was it different this time?

I'd played Wuthering Waves in the morning and EverQuest 2 in the afternoon and I felt like playing something different in the evening... but what? Nothing came to mind, so while I was thinking about it I passed the time checking my feeds, which was when I noticed Tipa had posted about her experiences playtesting The White Raven, a game I'd not heard of before. 

It didn't really sound like my sort of thing but Tipa compared aspects of TWR to Baldur's Gate 3, a game I definitely want to play. That one, I definitely would play right away but I'm waiting for a good deal. 

I realise it might take a while. BG3 is in the Steam Summer Sale but only at 20% off. Then again, last time it was only down 10% so the needle is moving in the right direction. I'm waiting until it hits at least 50% off, which I suspect could still be a while. Like years.

BG3 might be out of contention but what about something similar? I had a think about what it was about The White Raven and Baldur's Gate that was making me itchy to play and it occured to me pretty quickly it wasn't the the deep storytelling or the top-class voice acting so much as the magic-based tactical combat. That was the itch I was trying to scratch. I wanted to throw fireballs at goblins again.

The last game I played where I got to indulge that urge was The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: Amulet of Chaos, which I got free with Amazon Prime. That one turned out to be much more entertaining than I expected, a common theme in reviews of the game, whose charms seemed to take everyone by surprise. Something like that would be perfect. 

Unfortunately I couldn't think of anything like that, although something exactly the same was an option. There's a confusing amount of DLC in the Naheulbeuk series, all of it relatively cheap, so that seemed like an obvious fix. What put me off was knowing there had to be a good chance most of it would eventually pitch up on Prime for free, since that's Amazon's established pattern with franchises once they start giving them away. It would be really annoying to buy a bunch of sequels now, only to have them appear in the Prime offer a month or two down the line.

I couldn't come up with anything else but I thought I might know someone who could. For a given value of "someone", that is. I thought I'd ask Gemini, Google's AI, to suggest something suitable. It would either solve my problem or give me something to laugh about. 

I was even hoping Gemini might come up with a hidden gem or two. It did not.

It did, however, give me five extremely solid recommendations: 

Baldur's Gate 3 
Divinity: Original Sin 2
XCom 2
Battle Brothers
Solasta: Crown of the Magister

The question I asked was "Please give me the names of some games similar to The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk." You can't really fault that for an answer.

I've covered why I'm not considering BG3 at this time. D:OS2 I've already played. The XCom series doesn't have magic-based combat. Battle Brothers has one of those names that make me think "Nope" without even bothering to find out any more about it.

Solasta, though...

I remember Tobold posting about that one a few times. He rated it highly and he plays a lot of these sorts of games. I remember him saying it might be as good as BG3, in terms of the tactical gameplay, even if the story and acting weren't on the same level. And since it was the tactical gameplay I was mostly interested in...

So I checked and guess what? It's in the Steam sale with a whopping 70% discount. 

I can take a hint. I bought it without hesitation.

Then, as if to prove a point but actually because I really wanted to, I played it. An hour last night and another this morning, which was all the time I had available.

So far, I'm enjoying it, although I can hardly comment on the tactical gameplay I bought it for because I've yet to encounter any. Also, again as if to prove a point, the voice acting is arguably less convinving than the AI in Ales and Tales. 

As far as getting my money's-worth goes, though... two hours in and I'm not only still in the Tutorial, I haven't even finished going round the shops yet!

At this rate, Solasta will probably last me until the Steam Winter Sale.

No Cats, Dogs Or Humans Were Involved In The Making Of This Game

For almost as long as I've been playing video games there have been programs or utilities or apps that were supposed to help people with few or no programming skills make their own games. Some were fairly successful, opening up whole new sub-genres in which amateur enthusiasts and semi-professional creators marketed and sold their - often generic and frequently quite similar - efforts to each other like stallholders at a craft fair. And then there's Roblox but I think I'll side-step that little landmine.

A few, like The Quill,  Neverwinter Nights 2 or RPG Maker, had entire sub-cultures built around them. Games made using them were released commercially. People made money. But the thing about all of them was that you still had to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself. 

The pitch of many game-making apps is that you'll be able to make commercial quality games with no technical experience. The implication is that it'll also be easy and require no effort. The first might possibly be true. The second most definitely is not.

I made adventures with both The Quill and NWN2 and it took me weeks of work each time. The utilities did a good job of making the process accessible to a non-coder but there was still a great deal of learning involved even before I got down to the part that really interested me, writing the plot, the descriptions and the dialog.

Now, though, we have the prospect of AI to do it all for us, for real this time. All we'll have to do is tell the AI what we want and it'll give it to us, like when you tell a genie your wish. Except we all know how careful you need to be with those wishes. A genie isn't your friend, it doesn't have your best interests at heart - and it can be a lot harder to put one back in its bottle than it was to let it out.

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty! Now where did those darn cats go?

Never stops anyone trying, though, does it? A lot of heavyweight gaming companies are making all kinds of noises about how generative AI and LLMs are going to make making games easier or faster or more efficient. And more profitable of course. Let's not forget that part.

For the moment, most of them are being cautious about what they say in public. Those with the smarter marketing departments will be aware that even mentioning an interest in AI could cause some potential customers to look elsewhere for their entertainment. 

The acceptable line to take seems to be that AI is just another tool in the box for professional artists, writers and designers, a pitch that has the considerable benefit of following a very well-established historical pattern for new technology, almost every example of which, no matter how reviled when first encountered, ended up being assimilated into the production process and accepted by the audience. 

Unlike any previous technological innovation, though, generative AI appears to have the potential to be considerably more than a tool for creators. Some people, on both sides of the argument, believe it can replace human creativity entirely. 

Enter Bitmagic. Here's the full description from Steam:

"Bitmagic brings 3D game creation to Steam for anyone, whatever language they speak, wherever they are. Creators just type in a description of the game they want to create; and watch it appear before their eyes; no design skills, no coding or technical knowledge required. It’s really that simple.

Bitmagic creates the game concept for you, builds the background story and creates an immersive 3D world around the story. The games are fully playable and easily tunable through the same text prompt."

There's also a disclosure which, judging by the phrasing, appears to have been added at Valve's insistence:

"AI GENERATED CONTENT DISCLOSURE
The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Players can create and modify games using text prompts. The game uses AI (LLM) to understand the player's request and then uses LLM to construct the game using a pre-defined asset library."

Bitmagic is currently available through Steam as a free Playtest although right now you can't just download it and try it out. You have to request access, which just takes a click of a button on the Steam Store page.

At the moment the wait time is minimal. I clicked the button on Thursday and on Friday I got an email telling me I'd been invited to join the test. I was very curious to see how it worked so I installed the client and logged in straight away.

So far I've spent just over half an hour with Bitmagic. I think it's quite unlikely I'll add much to that. I've seen about as much as I need to for now. 

I don't intend to review it. It's on Steam. It's free. If you're curious, go try it for yourself. 

What I am going to do is describe what I saw and what I did and why I was both impressed and disappointed. The game (I'll call it a game for convenience.) runs in Unity and places calls to ChatGPT as required. In less than thirty-five minutes I made two games and played one of them to the finish. I also played one of the three games made by other people, featured on the login screen.

That's a lot to get through in just over half an hour. It suggests that the claim of instant game creation isn't all that much of an exaggeration. And it's not, always assuming the game you want is one where you run around collecting objects by running through them. Both the games I made and the one I played that had been made by someone else had that - and only that - as the gameplay.

The basic process is incredibly simple. You just type something into a text field and wait for about a minute. Then a big window pops up telling you what your game is called and giving you a brief description. Anyone who's ever used ChatGPT will immediately recognize the prose style.

Actual contents may differ.

You can then log in and play your game. You'll get to play as a pre-generated character. At first I assumed that would also be AI-created on the fly but as far as I can tell you just get allocated one of the half- dozen you can see on the Store page. One time I got the woman with the afro, another the green elf. 

The game-worlds looks quite pretty. The controls are simple and they work well. The game gives you a quest or task to do and there's a directional indicator to tell you where to go to do it. Other than that, there's absolutely no explanation of any kind, neither for the game itself nor for the creative mode you can enter to "tune" it.

That was my main complaint: lack of documentation. Other than that, I found the whole thing mildly impressive in that it genuinely does create a complete - if extremely simple - game in seconds. The games it created for me weren't the games I'd asked for but I guess you can't have everything.

For my first game I asked for a game in which a black and white dog caught a ball. I got as game with no dogs, where I ran around finding soccer balls. For my second, I asked for an RPG in which I could play as a cat. I got one where I played as an elf who had to find an Enchanted Moonstone. (Spoiler: I never found it.)

Mono-pups? Make that Zero-pups!

That ought to be where the tuning comes in. You should be able to tweak the game to get it closer to what you're after. And I guess you might be able to do it, if you could figure out how. I couldn't, at least not before I lost interest in trying.

I did manage to make some changes. It's very easy to spawn objects or creatures into the game. I worked that out fast enough. You do really only have to type in a request and the game will make it happen. I asked for a tiger and I got a tiger. I asked for some rabbits and I got some rabbits.

Most impressively, I asked for a sword I could pick up and use and I got one. It appeared on the ground and I was able to click on it and have it appear in my character's hand. So far so cool.

Unfortunately, anything I asked the game to do that involved more than spawning things and picking them up was just ignored, as were some quite specific requests. I asked for "a very large tiger" and got a regular-sized tiger. I asked for "some large rabbits" and got some rabbit-sized rabbits. I asked for a sword I could pick up and use to kill things with and I got a sword I could wave around and have any creature in the world completely ignore. 

My inability to affect the environment wasn't limited to things I'd created, either. One building I went in was full of keys. I could pick the keys up and they went into my inventory. There were chests lying around all over the place outside. I could not find any way to interact with those chests using the keys. Whether they were supposed to or not I have no idea.

Suure... "Very large"...  for a house-cat!

I thought it was possible all these things could be made to work somehow but I couldn't figure out how to do it, so I went looking for instructions. I couldn't find any, not in the game, on the Store Page or on the official website. 

I did find a few videos on YouTube, one of which is by Jani, the CEO of Bitmagic, in which he gives a "Behind-the-scenes Tutorial". That sounded ideal. Unfortunately, about all it showed was how to spawn things then blow them up or knock them down. He also drove around in a jeep and demonstrated how you could change the weather and time of day. I suspect that may be all you can do right now.

Whether you'll ever be able to do anything else is, I guess, the big question. As it stands, Bitmagic could be a fun toy but it's not going to make games for you. Well  it'll make one game that you can fit with different skins and that's barely a game at all. 

As proof of concept, though? Maybe. Bitmagic is getting regular updates so it's worth keeping an eye on. I'd say it would need to be a lot more versatile for to expect much of a take-up but then... Roblox...

Bitmagic wasn't the only AI-related game I played on Steam these last couple of days. This morning I spent almost fifty minutes with a demo called Ale and Tavern: First Pints. I'm not going to review this one, either, although I should stress that it was made by humans - it's not any kind of AI production. 

Bar work? Hard pass.

Except...

The reason I downloaded it and gave it a look was something I saw in a couple of the reviews. The demo has been very well-received. It has Overwhelmingly Positive rating from around seven hundred reviews. One thing a couple of people didn't like, though, was the AI voice acting.

That made me curious. I'm not sure I've heard any AI voice acting in a game yet. I've heard a lot of AI grunting but not proper dialog, spoken aloud. So I installed the demo and played through it to see what that might sound like.

Fine. It sounded fine, although I don't have all that much to go on.  I didn't play the demo all the way to the end (It's really not my kind of game.) but in the three-quarters of an hour I spent with it I only heard two characters speak; the PC and a Merchant. 

The Merchant did have a fair amount to say and my character answered him a few times so I think got to hear enough to say that I have no idea how anyone knew it was AI-generated speech to begin with, if it even is. I can't see anywhere it says so other than in those reviews and had the idea not been put into my mind, I can't imagine it would ever have occured to me. 

What's more, although the performance seemed a bit exaggerated and actorly, I thought it generally sounded better than most voice acting in games like this. All the stresses came in the right place and all the line readings felt right, which is certainly above par. Plus the spoken and written dialog matched exactly for a change.

Kinda hard to take a screenshot of what something sounds like.

If this is the standard of AI voice in games, I wouldn't imagine most players would even notice. I certainly wouldn't. It's a tad bland, sure, but there's nothing unusual about that. I've heard plenty worse. In fact, it's exactly the kind of voice-work I wouldn't normally comment on. It's not very immersive or convincing but it certainly wouldn't put me off playing.

The more I think about it, the less convinced I am it even is AI. and that's the fear, isn't it? If players can't tell if something's been put into the game by a human or an AI, are they going to care? At that point it becomes an ethical issue and gamers and ethics haven't always - or often - been bedfellows. 

It's a problem that's only going to become more difficult as the technology improves. It reminds me of the ridiculous news stories that turned up in my feeds after Dua Lipa's headlining performance at Glastonbury last weekend, when people took to social media to rant about her performance not being "real" because she was too good. 

Apparently she sounded so perfect she had to be faking. Of course, she wasn't but if people can't even tell the difference between a real person singing live and a recording, what are the chances of them spotting an AI talking in a video game?

The game may not be so great but the view's pretty good.

As for the companies that make the games it will, as always, come down to the bottom line. If it makes more money they'll do it. They may learn to be a bit cannier about how they do it but they'll do it, alright.

One thing I think we can count on: no matter how good the tech gets, we won't be making our own games at the click of a mouse any time soon. That would be like giving away the farm. At best we might get something that lets us play at making games but I wouldn't even count on that. 

I'd lay odds that if any full-feature AI game-making apps do eventually appear, it'll be still down to us to do most of the creative work, making it a niche product for hobbyists like all the rest. Anything that's genuinely able to churn out commercial quality games at the touch of a button is going to be locked up safely in a warehouse somewhere and never seen again. 

It's one thing to have AI replace your workers but you don't want it to replace the whole damn business! Then where would your bonuses come from?