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.

The Revolving Door Into Summer

Somewhat to my surprise, I don't appear to have posted about Wuthering Waves for a couple of weeks. I don't want to give the impression I'm not playing the game any more or even that I've forgotten about it altogether. That would be entirely incorrect. I've just had too much else to write about. There's so much going on in gaming this summer.

Seriously, though, isn't there? Syp posted about it last week, name-checking expansions for Final Fantasy XIV, Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft. He also mentioned the Tarisland launch, as did both I and Wilhelm (Who was less than impressed.)

Wilhelm also reminded us of another major MMORPG getting a global launch this summer, namely Throne and Liberty, the not-a-sequel to whatever version of Lineage came out last. That one doesn't actually launch until the middle of September but there's a short open beta in July and anyway September is still summer, the way some people reckon it.

Then there's the Anashti Sul server Darkpaw just spun up for EverQuest II and not one but two fresh "Legendary" servers arriving in Lord of the Rings Online next month, all aimed at the surprisingly large number of people still interested in starting over for the umpteenth time in the same games they played years ago, a demographic that apparently no longer includes either Wilhelm or me, at least as far as EQII is concerned.

I could go on. For example, there's Pax Dei, a game I have no interest in but which a lot of people seemed to be very excited about, at least until the developers made the mistake of letting people play it. So many games make that cardinal error. Palworld has its first really big update scheduled to land just three days from now, the same day as the Steam Summer Sale...

Had enough? Because there's plenty more. EVE just launched an expansion. Once Human goes live on 9 July. Even Raph Koster is up to something...

What is it with the summer? Looking just at the games and events I've mentioned, I get the point of a summer launch window for some of them. I'm guessing the demographic interested in playing Tarisland, Throne and Liberty and maybe Palworld probably skews towards school and college age. 

The rest, though? Don't these people have jobs? Do they really take the summer off to play games?

It's almost as though the developers think it's still the 'nineties or the early 2000s, when most people over twenty-five couldn't have told you the name of any video game, unless Hollywood had made a movie out of it. And even then all they'd really be able to say about it would be that the movie was terrible. 

Back then, it probably did make sense to push everything at kids on their long summer break. Catch them when they were all sitting at home, the empty weeks stretching out ahead, nothing to do to kill the boredom but play video games... not to mention their parents, frazzled and flustered, ready to throw a few dollars at anything that might keep the little darlings off their backs for a while.

The world isn't like that any more, is it? Everyone plays games now, grown-ups included. Gaming's not just kids' stuff any more. Or so I'm led to believe.

Yesterday, I watched a recent episode of a mainstream TV quz show in which two contestants in their sixties were asked to identify famous video games from the name of one of the main characters and the initial  letters of the words in the game's title. They couldn't do it but the mere fact the producers thought it was a reasonable question to ask shows how far towards the mainstream video-gaming has moved over the last twenty years.

Some of it is just perception bias, of course. Games don't all come out in the summer. New games and expansions arrive year-round. The carousel never stops spinning. Still, there does seem to be some old thinking behind a lot of the scheduling choices. 

It's long seemed like an odd practice to me and this current glut really draws attention to it. As an adult in employment, I've often thought the time I'd really appreciate some good, new titles and expansions would be the long, dark, inhospitable evenings of winter and early spring. From the New Year until Easter. That's when I get home from work and fins myself with time on my  hands. 

It's also the very slot that did so well for Valheim and Palworld, neither of which I might have found time for had they arrived in the summer. Is it a co-incidence there've been so many unexpected hits around that time of year?

The other big launch window of the year, late November through early December, is even worse for me, although that does have a lot to do with the commercial sector in which I work. It's when I'm at my busiest, with the least interest in - and time for - playing games. Summer may not be ideal for staying inside staring at a screen - at least not when we get some decent weather as we are right now - but it's certainly better for me than right before Christmas.

Then again, if I lived in one of the parts of the world where it's too hot to go outdoors in the summer until after dark and I had good-quality air-conditioning, I guess I might be happy to have something to keep me entertained while I hid from the big burning ball in the sky. 

Where I live, warm, dry sunny days are so rare it feels positively ungrateful to sit indoors when one happens to come along, let alone if there's a whole week of good weather (Fanciful idea, I know...) I sometimes forget it's not like that for everyone. We all look at things from our own perspective too much, sometimes.

And that was a somewhat over-extended introduction to the post about Wuthering Waves I was planning to write but no longer have time for. I ought to keep it in mind for that bit of Blaugust where we share our blogging tips, the specific tip in this case being "Don't do what I just did".

Had I stuck to the script, I would have extemporized on how I'm still playing WW and on what a very good game it's turning out to be. I even had some specific examples in mind, drawn from my many hours of play, ready to drive the point home.

Now I guess all of that will have to wait for next time, assuming I can keep my mind on the job then.

At least I got to use a few of the hundreds of screenshots I've taken so far so I guess my afternoon hasn't been entirely wasted...

What A Difference A Year Makes... Or Doesn't

I was halfway through a post about how the Tarisland launch wasn't going so great, when I tried logging in for a second time and found most of my problems had been of my own making. In my defence, the whole login procedure does feel like a bit of a mess and definitely more so than it was in beta. 

There was one big plus - I was able to patch up the beta client and use that for the Live Launch without having to start over from scratch. After that it all got a bit confusing. 

I took advantage of yesterday's pre-launch update window, using my email and password from beta and that all worked fine. Then this morning, a couple of hours after the game went Live, I tried to use the same details to log in and they wouldn't go through. 

I tried logging in through Google using the same email address instead, which entailed re-authorising the account. That may or may not have duplicated my registration, I'm not sure. I didn't get a new notification so probably not.

If at first you don't succeeed...

Whichever account it was that I logged into, it was able to get as far as server select but there I was stymied by two messages, One told me the Recommended server (EU2) was down for maintenance and the other that the original (EU1) was full. 

All the time this was happening, the introductory video, complete with bombastic music and voice acting to match, was playing on a loop in the background. I think I heard the whole thing all the way through at least three times. It made it very hard to concentrate so it's quite likely I missed something or messed something up. 

I guess it must either have been that or the maintenance was just about to finish because when I tried again a few minutes later, intending to check the sequence of events for the post I was writing, I was able to log in right away. All of that didn't put me in the best frame of mind to be impressed and neither as it turned out did what |I saw when I got into the game. 

I first played Tarisland almost a year ago, on 27 June 2023. I was very positive about the experience.  "The whole thing feels rock solid", "I felt like I was home!" and "I had a very good time" were just a few of the compliments I handed the game back then.

I wonder if Stylist Tony has any red hair dye?

Here's where the old "Better in beta" thing (First cousin to the Early Access paradox.) raises its grizzled head. If I had such a good time a year ago, will I still have that good a time now, when nothing feels quite so fresh and new?

It's too early to say for sure but my money's on no. Not because the game's changed. If anything, more because it hasn't. I mean, they've had a year so I imagine they;'ve done something with the time but I just skimmed that First Impression post and everything I said then still holds true so whatever they've been working on it clearly wasn't the starting experience. The difference is, this time I'm not likely to be pleasantly surprised by how good the game is - I'm much moe likely to be mildly disappointed it's not better.

I'm not going to go over the same ground again, though. I paid the first thirty levels or so some pretty good attention last year and I bet there's not much different about them now. Not much point rehashing the experience unless I find something different to say about it.

I'll most likely skip "First Impressions" from here on in and just put Tarisland on the "Posts About Stuff I'm Doing In Games I Play" pile, at least until I run into something I haven't written about already.

What I am going to do, probably unfairly, is briefly compare and contrast Tarisland with another game in that stack, Wuthering Waves. The main reason it's not a fair comparison is that Tarisland is a full-fat MMORPG, while Wuthering Waves is, at most, a co-op RPG. The way I'm playing it, it's a straight-up solo game. 

Dang! Wouldn't you just know it? My character's lost her memory - again!

That said, there are some strong similarities, not least that both games are translated, fully-voiced Chinese imports with open-world settings and cartoonish graphics. A year ago I described Tarisland's translations as "varied", something I also think would be a fit description of the English version of Wuthering Waves. The difference between the two is that the translatio in WW varies from exceptional to average import standard, whereas my immediate impression of Tarisland this morning was much less generous.

I think what's happened here is that my benchmark for a good translation has been raised by a few titles I've played since I was in that first Tarisland beta, particularly Wuthering Waves and Once Human. Neither of those is anything like as good as they could be - I've yet to play any translated F2P title that maintains a naturalstic English tone throughout - even the best of them have wonky passages - but they both have moments that impress. 

The real worry, however, is that the translations that make the best showing do so in the early stages, where a lot of care has clearly been taken to get someone who does genuinely speak modern, demotic English to give the final version a polish. They all tend to drift down to something closer to Google Translate later on but Tarisland's translation is already slipping a little right out of the gate, with some infelicitous phrasing and text that doesn't match what's being said.

Now that looks weirdly familiar...

Graphically, Tarisland does look good but not, in my opinion, as good as Wuthering Waves, which continues to make me happy just to look at it. Once again I feel as though my own preferences may have altered in the last twelve months. The fact is, I've watched a lot of anime since then and played a fair amount of anime-inflected games. I think I have slightly less affection for the chunkier WoW-style look Tarisland affects than I did a year ago. 

Also, I think maybe it is an affectation. Looking at the screenshots I took today, there's a bit of a cut-and-shut feel to some of them, as if someone had grabbed some NPCs and scenery out of one game and pasted it into another. In the shot above, the grass and that mountain split down the middle could have come straight out of Wuthering Waves but in the shot below almost everything feels like it was lifted from the Tauren starting zone. They barely look like the same game.

The third comparison that doesn't go in Tarisland's favor is variety of content. TL is very much a HIgh Fantasy MMORPG with all that entails. The opening cinematic is ludicrously portentous and terrifyingly overwrought and from what I remember about the storyline, it's just one damn crisis after another and an awful lot of fights.

Push harder at the back or we're never getting up this hill!

By contrast, while Wuthering Waves also has plenty of that, it also has lots of saving cats from trees, posing for bad portrait painters, parkour, puzzles, theater performances and all kinds of nonsense. I'm starting to realise I might be more interested in saving cats than saving the world. Is that bad?

None of these potential drawbacks is going to stop me playing Tarisland. I liked it plenty last year and I'm sure I'll find a lot to enjoy there still. I could certainly do with a tab-target MMORPG I haven't sucked all the juice out of yet and this one will do just fine, for now. I don't think I'll be clocking up four-hour sessions every day but I'm sure I'll keep noodling away at it indefinitely.

And that's about all I have to say about it for now. I really just wanted to record the fact that the game launched and I played it. From here on it's just going to be another game I play, sometimes.

Probably.

Sign-Up Season Begins

You don't see a sign-up form for weeks and then three come along all at once...

Tarisland Revs Up

For launch. Sometime. Would be nice if we had an actual date but you can't have everything.  According to MassivelyOP we can rule out 14 June, at least. Hardly surprising since that's a Friday. When did any game ever launch on a Friday? (Cue comments listing all the famous games that did indeed launch on a Friday...)

I'm not sure I'd call June "near" but I suppose its all context. Everything is context. Since I was already registered from the closed betas last year, I wasn't sure if I'd need to "Sign Up" again but I figured it would be best to check. 

Just as well I did. I used the same email address and my application was accepted as if it was the first time Level Infinite had ever seen it so I'm guessing we're starting over as though we've never met.

I'd make some observations here about whether or not I'm likely to play Tarisland and if so how seriously and for how long but June might as well be the year 3000 as far as that goes. If I'd made book at New Year on what games I'd be playing until Easter I'd have lost my Gunsmith Cats tee. Come the launch, I could be playing anything so I'm making no promises.

That said, I did like Tarisland quite a bit. It's retro enough to feel nostalgic but modern enough not to come across as old-fashioned. It does feel a bit generic in places but it zips along and it's fun to play so why not? Also, I imagine it will be the new hotness for at least five minutes and I'd like the blog to bask in that heat, so it'd take something big to stop me at least giving it a run, I think.

Throne and Liberty Goes West

Apparently a lot of people have been angsting about not being able to play this one since the it launched in South Korea last December. I can't say I've been paying much attention although I did vaguely remember the name. Yesterday there was finally news of a playable opportunity for everyone outside the current launch region as sign-ups opened for a global closed beta starting on 10 April. 

In something of an autonomic reaction I immediately went to register but balked at having to input my Amazon account details. I'd completely forgotten the game was being published by Amazon here. While I was checking it was all legit, I discovered the beta is under NDA so that was the end of that. 

If I was desperate to play I'd have sucked it up and signed but given the only reason I was even looking at the beta was in the hope of squeezing a few blog posts out of the experience, there really wouldn't have been much point. I'll wait until they drop the NDA or go into open beta or maybe even actually launch the damn thing.

The whole thing did have the effect of making me curious about Throne and Liberty in a way I wasn't before, so at least there's that. As far as I can tell the game still has no launch window more specific than "soon". I'm wondering what the heck they need to do to it to make it ready, given it's already up and running in some territories.

I watched the trailer, flipped through the screen shots and read the description on Steam. It looks like every other imported MMORPG of the last six or seven years to me, albeit marginally prettier. My PC doesn't meet even the minimum specs but then that's true of plenty of games I play with no issues at all. I got very lucky with my CPU, it seems. It always outperforms benchmarks.

I'll give T&L a go when it comes out of NDA, anyway. It's on Steam and it's free so why not? Can't imagine I'll play for more than a handful of sessions but at least it'll give me a chance to write some First Impressions posts. I do love doing those.

Palia Steams In

Whoop, and if you'll pardon me, de-do. I mean, I'm not complaining. As we've discussed before, it's very handy to have all the games under one roof. I am a Steam convert if not actually a Steam fan. 

I haven't played Palia since... hmm. Let me check... looks like last August. If you asked me I wouldn't say I'd given up on it but I never seem to find any reason to log in. Until last night.

As soon as I saw the news, I went to Steam to download the client and... it wasn't available. I was too early! I added it to my wishlist and forgot about it... for all of five minutes, after which I got an email from Steam telling me it was available. That's what I call service!

I started the download running but what I wanted to know was whether I'd have to begin again from scratch or whether I'd be able to transfer my existing character and progress to my Steam account. I spent a good while googling that without finding any useful information at all so when the big, green PLAY button lit up I thought I'd just click it and see what would happen. 

It wasn't as though I'd gotten very far last time. Or at least I didn't think I had. I couldn't actually remember how far I had got. Anyway, starting over didn't seem like it would be much of a problem.

As it turns out it wasn't any kind of a problem at all because I didn't have to do it. You can indeed carry on from where you left off. Steam pretty much does all ther admin for you, too. A window popped up asking if I wanted to link my Steam and Singularity 6 accounts. I said I did, found my old login and password, entered them in the relevant fields and that was all there was to it. Slick and quick.

If there was a problem, it didn't come from the process. It came from the game. I can't recall the last time I logged into a game I haven't played for a while and felt my mood slump so fast. Almost from the moment I was in I wanted to leave. 

So I did. My current played time for Palia on Steam is five minutes. It may well stay that way, possibly forever. There's nothing actively wrong with Palia that I can put my finger on... I just find it stiflingly dull. 

Dull to look at and dull to play. I don't even think it's an issue with the implementation; I think it's the genre. 

According to the description on the Steam store page, Palia is a "a cozy community sim MMO made for you and your friends". I don't have any friends to play Palia with and frankly I don't want to get any. I find it hard to imagine how doing the things you can do in Palia with other people would make doing those things any more interesting than doing them alone. They just aren't very interesting to me, period, and that's an end to it.

It's not that it's the kind of gameplay I find intrinsically uninteresting. Other than the lack of combat, there's little fundemental difference between the activities on offer in Palia and those in Nightingale. There is quite a difference in the visuals and the setting, though, and it's clear that Nightingale's world appeals to me aesthetically in a way Palia's does not. Palia's world is also tiny compared to Nightingale's, which makes the explorer in me sad. 

Still, I think the real difference between them lies in the word "cozy".

I love being cozy. I like to sit in my comfy chair with the fire blazing and Beryl snoozing on the rug beside me. It's the very image of coziness. Virtual coziness, though? Is that appealing? Isn't it literally emulating on screen what I'm experiencing in real life? Don't we play to experience something different? Something thrilling, even.

I know I frequently claim I don't appreciate challenge in my games but what I mean by that is challenge that makes me tense, anxious or stressed. Challenge that falls well within my capabilities feels satisfying. Palia, from what I remember of it from last summer, manages to be both unchallenging and yet still  low-key stressful by way of its annoyingly awkward gameplay, while not providing much in the way of intellectual curiosity, emotional engagement or excitement by way of compensation

It's not so much cozy as dull, that's how I remember it and five minutes there last night brought all of that dullness back. I'm not saying I won't play it any more but I can't say I have any immediate plans. Still, it's there on Steam if I want it, now, which has to increase the chances somewhat.

Now if Once Human would just... oh, wait a moment...

Sifting Through The Embers

It's been a while since I was last enthused or excited about the imminent launch of a new mmorpg. Thinking about it, I wonder if it's happened at all since Guild Wars 2 a decade ago. I could check back through the blog but the very fact that nothing comes immediately to mind tells its own story.

That's not to say there hasn't been a steady procession of new games I've been interested in or enjoyed - there most certainly has - but it's been much more "Oh, that looks like it might be worth a try" than "When's it coming out? I can't wait!". As I was musing the other day, I'm not one hundred percent convinced that, did I not have a blog to write, I would be playing new mmorpgs at all. I'd more likely just be ditzing around in the same old ones, quite contentedly.

With that in mind, it's perhaps not surprising I completely missed the (surprisingly smooth) launch of a relatively significant title this weekend. The first I really knew about it was this morning, when a couple of news items caught my eye. It was only when I came to do the research so I could write this post that I realized not only had I failed to notice the game had gone live, I'd been wholly mistaken about the kind of game it was, pretty much from the moment the Indiegogo campaign that introduced it to the world began.

I can cite a few mitigating circumstances to explain, if not excuse, my series of errors. For a start, I stopped following development of the a long time ago. I crossed the game off of my mental checklist a few years back, mostly thanks to some tetchy dev responses I'd seen in comment threads. It seemed for a while as though even mentioning the game unfavorably in passing would result in a visitation so I avoided mentioning it here at all, an embargo that snowballed into avoiding reading about it and eventually into forgetting it even existed.

Before I stopped paying attention altogether, I did read a particular series of marketing and PR releases that skewed my understanding of the game altogether. There was a moment when Saga of Lucimia, as the game was then called, was making a big deal of how dark it was going to be. That's not dark as in horror-inflected. They meant literally dark as in "can't see your hand in front of your face".

The video that showed all the things you wouldn't be able to see is no longer available but as the  article on MassivelyOP explained, "Players won’t be able to use torches in battle, but the darkness will still be there, meaning that players will need to have someone in the group holding a lantern or torch so that you can see what’s going on."

Somehow I got it into my head that the entire game was going to be like this all the time. Until about an hour ago, I did genuinely believe the original plan for Saga of Lucimia was for a world perpetually shrouded in darkness, where you'd never see anything that wasn't illuminated by an artificial light source and in which one spot in every group would always have to be taken by someone who did nothing but hold a torch.

In retrospect, that never seemed likely to work, let alone be popular, even with hardcore, old school mmorpg vets and indeed no-one was expecting that it would be. I'd simply missed the point.  Night-time and some dungeons would be very dark but the world itself would have normal day/night cycles and no-one was being asked to carry a torch outdoors, when the sun was up. 

Another thing I hadn't really taken on board were the many comparisons with original EverQuest and Vanguard, both reference points that would normally have piqued my interest. I had registered the extremely strong commitment to group-centered gameplay - the original pitch specifies "Zero solo content" - but my conception of early EQ, from the perspective of someone who'd been there at the time, was of a very solo-friendly game. The supposed connection between EQ, Vanguard and "group content only" was lost on me. Still is, for that matter.

About the last thing I remember hearing about the game was when an internal implosion within the development team resulted in a change of name. Unfortunately, when the new name, Embers Adrift, began to appear in news items, I confused it with another, extremely similar name, Worlds Adrift, a now-shuttered mmorpg, whose main focus was steampunk airships. Every time I saw an article about how Embers Adrift was coming along, I mistakenly thought it was talking about another game entirely.

Given all of that, it would have been a miracle if I'd spotted the open beta in time to take a look for myself. I didn't, which was a shame. It was only three days, so I didn't miss much, but I would have liked to have popped in and taken a look around.

That was my one chance to see the game for free but of course, now it's launched, I could pay and play any time. Having had a quick flick through the information available on the website, I have to say I'm significantly more interested in that possibility than I ever imagined I might be.

The general tone of the website is far more welcoming than I remember from the game's earlier iteration. It reads very much like the other would-be "old school" mmorpgs, Pantheon, Camelot Unchained and the rest - very much focused on the tastes and expectations of people who enjoyed playing these kinds of games nearly a quarter of a century ago but recognizing that times have changed and not always for the worse.

Most specifically, gone are the boasts that the game features no solo content whatsoever or that absolutely nothing can be achieved without a group. Instead, as the FAQ puts it, "Grouping is not required in Embers Adrift, but it is highly recommended. With a group you'll be able to get to locations that you never could reach on your own." 

An article at MMO Haven has a detailed, bullet-point list of features that seems to have been written with the more curious, less already-committed potential player in mind. It claims the game has "Adventure content designed for solo players, small groups, and full 6-person groups for levels 1-50" and "Vast overland zones and non-linear dungeons with escape routes". 

All of that makes the game sound considerably more like the EverQuest I remember, rather than the peculiar "uphill in the snow both ways" miserable experience that seems to have become the mantra of a certain kind of reverse-rose-colored-glasses demographic. The promotional material mentions a number of features that appeal to me, among them being able to gain xp purely by killing mobs and traditional tab-targetting combat.

At this point I might very well be thinking of making an account, downloading the game and giving it a try. Granted, there's absolutely no chance I'm going to be settling back into the kind of forty hour a week grind that so enraptured me back at the turn of the millennium. I'm confident that will never happen again and I wouldn't want it to. 

I would, though, be very happy to have a new game using those old mechanics that I could potter around in for a while, seeing the sights in the lower-level areas, putting in a few hours here and there, now and then, as the mood takes me, killing rats, kobolds, goblins or whatever the local farmers feel they can't handle (Although the FAQ does point out that farmers in Embers aren't quite as helpless as we've become used to seeing in other games: "While some NPCs wouldn't mind a hand around the farm...they typically handle their smaller problems on their own").

I might even have been curious and tempted enough to lay out the $29.99 they're asking. It's an introductory price, set to rise to $39.99 in November. Thirty dollars isn't an unreasonable price to pay for a buy-to-play mmorpg, even one from an unproven, indie studio, although I feel $40 might be pushing it a little.

Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. In keeping with its traditionalist values, Embers Adrift also comes with a $9.99 monthly subscription, a price that's also set to rise after an introductory period, this time to $14.99 in the New Year. Once again, I don't think that's necessarily an unreasonable ask. If the company wants to keep entirely clear of all kinds of cash shop shennigans as it claims, foregoing both lockboxes cash shop with the commitment that it "will never have micro transactions", the money to keep the servers up is going to haveto come from somewhere.

It just isn't going to come from me. And, frankly, I remain to be convinced it's going to come from enough people to keep Embers Adrift  viable in the medium to long term. The game probably doesn't need a huge number of people to sign up to meet the minimum commercial threshold for continued existence but there's very little understanding of just how big (or small) the potential market for these old-school titles is likely to be.

$40 for the "box" and $15 every month for as long as you want to play seems like a very significant barrier to entry in the current market. I'm very well aware from numerous conversations in the general chat channels of various older games that a hefty proportion of veteran gamers have enough disposable income to see these kinds of sums as trivial but those players also tend to be the most settled in their ways and the least likely to jump ship from the games they've already been playing for much of their lives. 

Whether a newcomer can prize enough of them away from EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot or WoW Classic or P99 or any of the myriad other emulator projects, most of which are either free to play or vastly better-known or both and most of which offer a combination of familiarity and novelty as they continue to build on established foundations, remains to be seen.

I hope they can. From all accounts I've seen so far, Embers Adrift is a solid attempt at providing a satisfying experience for a specific audience. That's a lot more than can be said of many of the crash-and-burn projects that have plagued the mmorpg gamespace in recent years. 

For me, it's probably not quite the right fit and also about a decade too late. I'm not saying I'll never pay a subscription for a new game of this kind - I'll probably stump up for Pantheon, if it ever arrives - but for now I'm happy enough with what I have.

What I most certainly will do, however, is take the opportunity to kick the wheels and inspect the teeth, should Embers Adrift ever decided to throw open the doors for a "free weekend" or offer some kind of  "free trial". I imagine it will have to, eventually, and I imagine those few days will probably be enough for me.

It'll Still Be Here Tomorrow But Will You?

Over the last few days, New World successfully passed two of my crucial tests for a possible new main mmorpg. Makes it sound as though I have a list, doesn't it? I wish I did. Maybe I should make one.

Until I do, these two will have to do:

1. The more I play, the more I want to play.
2. I begrudge having to do other things with the time I could be playing.

When was the last time that happened? Well, Valheim, for sure, but Valheim, much though it feels like one, isn't an mmorpg. Neither is Genshin Impact.

I think I might have to go back as far as the launch of Guild Wars 2 to find the last time this happened with an actual, for reals mmorpg. For all the enjoyment I've had out of the many quality imports - Blade & Soul, Black Desert Online, ArcheAge or this summer's Bless Unleashed - I don't recall any of them evoking the same sense of potential permanence that oozes from New World, a game that feels so obviously built to last.

It is only potential, of course. It is entirely possible that in a month or even a week I won't be writing about the game any more or even playing it. Maybe no-one will, or not enough to matter. Warhammer, Vanguard, Age of Conan, Wildstar - they all opened big, then faded.

In New World's case I don't get any sense there's likely to be that kind of front-loaded success followed by catastrophic collapse. People aren't going to lose interest as they discover the game isn't all they thought it would be. They know what it is already. They tried it in the various betas and liked it and the live game is just the same, only it doesn't stop.

In New World's case the problems are about access not content or execution. And of all the ways an mmorpg could struggle at launch, not being able to provide enough servers to meet demand has to be the least bad. Also the least long-lasting.

 

The current server issues and queues will be resolved, one way or another. The whole thing will settle down. Right now it seems super-important because everyone's stoked to play and frustrated because they can't but it's always like this when an mmorpg launch is more successful than anyone anticipated. Time telescopes. People talk about things as though there's a terrible immediacy but it's not even been a week yet.

Even unsuccessful mmorpgs run for years. Successful ones run for decades. The traumas of launch will be mostly forgotten in a matter of weeks, remembered, if at all, in the form of war stories told by battle-scarred veterans to disbelieving newbies. "You had to be there", they'll say, "we queued for hours. It was horrific!" and the latecomers will catch each other's eye and shake their heads. It never happened. Things were always good.

Or maybe not. Maybe this time the house of cards will come crashing down. Maybe, as Scopique suggests, all those tens, hundreds of thousands waiting in line will find they have time to re-consider whether they really want to play after all. Maybe they'll decide "Sod this for a lark" and log out, never to return.

I kind of doubt it. For one thing, this isn't a free-to-play game. All those people bought a box, albeit an imaginary one. They want their money's worth. Is there any kind of movement for refunds building, like there was with other high-profile disasters like No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk 2077? A class action suit, maybe? Those always pay off.

Probably not. Unlike those, this isn't a disastrous game, just a disastrous launch. What most people generally seem to agree, when they're able to get in and play, is that it's a pretty good game. 

 

What's more, it's a pretty good Western AAA mmorpg and those aren't dropping off the conveyor belt the way they used to do. It's not like everyone can choose to skip this one and wait for the next. That's years away. If you don't have the patience for the queues right now, waiting for Ashes of Creation's hardly the solution.

And then, there's a wealth of difference between finally getting to play the game you paid a lot of money for and finding you've been sold a pup and knowing if you only could get in you'd be having the time of your life. That's the kind of exclusivity that hasn't done any number of high-end venues and luxury marques any harm in the past.

Of course, Amazon will need to let everyone in eventually. There's a point when anticipation and longing turns to anger and rejection. I don't get the sense we're anywhere near that point yet, though. So long as the reports coming out of the game from people able to play remain positive about the experience and as long as Amazon appear to be doing what they can to improve the situation - and crucially saying the right things about what they're doing - then I'd say they have some slack, still.

How long will people wait? Well, how long did it take Blizzard to get the queues under control when World of Warcraft went ballistic? I don't know. I wasn't there. I've heard plenty of people talking about it over the years though, and my impression is the firefighting went on for weeks. Maybe months.

What that led to was the largest, if perhaps not the longest, period of sustained growth for an mmorpg we've seen. The reason? The game was good enough that people wanted to play despite how tough it was to get a slot. Word of mouth is powerful.

 

Is New World's word of mouth good enough to overcome the negative publicity of hours-long queues? Too soon to judge, perhaps, but I keep reading people saying things like "When I do manage to get in-game I’m having a great time" and "I have to say that New World has solid and engaging gameplay". That's the sort of thing that makes even people who weren't all that interested in the first place think "Hmm. Maybe there's something to this thing after all".

However it all falls out, I'd say it's a sure thing New World isn't going away any time soon, unlike Amazon's last two tries at breaking into gaming. A completely rational response right now would be to hold off and wait for things to settle. Yes, you might miss out on the launch-day/week/month excitement but that's a blip in the life of any mmorpg. The real game goes long.

I still don't think New World is going to be my next "main" mmorpg. It could be. It has the stuff. I just don't believe it will. I think it's going to be a lot of people's, though, and I don't think a few weeks of queues will do much to put a dent in its long-term prospects.

But then, it's easy for me to be sanguine. I can log in almost whenever I want. There are no queues on Zuvendis until 8 or 9pm my time and even then they're short. 

In fact, I'm going to stop typing this and log in right now. Because as I said at the top, the more I play New World the more I find I want to play it and I begrudge spending time I could be playing doing other things and that includes wirting about playing.

Probably says a lot more about the situation than the post about fishing in Aeternum I thought I was going to write when I started this an hour ago would have, doesn't it?

Explains the pictures, though.