The game I had wanted to look at this week is Gatheryn. They’re nominally in “open” beta, but put testers under a clickthrough NDA. So… they go on the list with all of my other closed beta games of interest in stead.

After a lot of debate and consideration, I’ve decided to just go ahead and give Florensia a shot and be done with it.

Week 5: Florensia

Florensia looks like a pretty generic Asian sort of MMO. The Western publication of the game is handled by the same folks who’re publishing Ragnarok Online and Hello Kitty Online in english, so I figure it’s worth a look for that reason alone.

Registration and Download

Since I’m short on time, I’m going to start with the download first. Hmm, official download URL requires I use Akamai’s download manager? How… quaint. My other options are the normal sort of big queued mirrors… I’ll try the downloader.

Interesting, it appears to be some sort of custom BT client that displays progress via my browser? Weird.

And… after a few minutes, it started making my network connection act a bit wonky, so I gave up with their method and just started retrieval from my favorite supplied mirrors.

And now that that’s running (1gb installer, about 1 hour eta if I throttle the download to play nice with others on the network with me right now)… it is time to register.

Registration is minimal. The only real survey question is a standard “where did you hear about us?” sort of deal. I find it funny that banner ads aren’t listed. If they’re spending enough on marketing that I am aware of them as a result of this… they should probably be capturing success metrics from this. Oh well, their loss. I clicked “other”.

Standard issue confirmation email wound up in my junk folder…

And after confirmation, it says it likes my registration. They gave me 10 BP for my trouble, some sort of micro-currency it seems. They have both AP and BP. Shrug, I’ll find out what those are if I wind up caring, I guess.

Research and Waiting

Looking around the web site, one of the first things I discover are the controls. WASD + QE are reasonable enough for moving around in first person. Autorun is bound to F. That’s good to know.

Ooh! Pretty. They have boats. With cannons. Ships are also driven with WASD, but with naturally different behaviors. No complaints there either. I wonder what are the odds that I’ll wind up driving a boat before Wednesday afternoon? I’m thinking about 5%? We’ll see.

Other default keybindings look pretty tolerable. In fact, they’re pretty common keybindings for a western mmo (‘I’ for inventory, ‘K’ for skills, ‘J’ for quest journal, etc). I take that as a good sign, maybe the translation here will be decent. This one appears to be Japanese in origin, so that might explain it.

Anyway, enough with the buttons. This boat thing, it intrigues me. I investigate it further.

It appears that you can build your own custom warship. The sample screenshots lead me to believe that the system will be out of reach financially during the course of this test, but you never know.

Looks like you can equip 3 different weapons at a time and quick swap between them. All weapons are of a fantasy swashbuckling nature. They provide a helpful grid of weapons available to each class and a basic graphic of how the weapons compare to each other.

I find it interesting in the extreme that dual pistols apparently have better range than a rifle Curious.

Hmm, what else can I find out while waiting for the download (24% complete)…

Skills are learned from books and are improved via skill points. Fishing seems to be a major economic activity and is the only source of some important items. Everything keeps referencing ships and crews… so maybe I’ll start off with one?

Questgivers are apparently identified by scrolls floating over their heads. There are separate quests for land and sea. Yup. I’m convinced now. If they don’t give me a boat tonight, I’m going to mumble and whine a lot.

Torpedoes! I must have a boat!

Names of places on the world map remind me of southwestern UK… with a bit of colonial Massachusetts for flavour.

It appears that a lot of equipment drops with 1-5 “seals” on it. These seals may be broken at the appropriate vendor to improve them. Sort of locked plusses. Nothing terribly unusual here, but good to know before I start wondering. In the grand tradition of this sort of game, there’s always a chance of failure (and even catastrophic failure?) when upgrading items, and you can farm special items to improve your chances of success. They also have a standard style item upgrade system that probably uses similar NPC’s and items to the seal system.

It appears that PvP is not yet implemented, but is planned for a later date.

Character classes… Explorers are agility based shooty types. Mercenaries are tough melee types. Nobles are mages with pretty clothes. Saints are nature priests. So, really, they have a standard Fighter/Thief/Cleric/Mage 4 class system, just with vaguely thematic names.

Naturally, there is a class specialization system, but since they require level 40 to upgrade, I don’t think I’ll be seeing that any time soon.

Hmm, what should I roll? Last month, I did: archer, archer, sort-of-paladin, medic with a crossbow. I think it’s time to try raw magical glass canon. Noble it is.

41% done downloading…

I’ve exhausted the official site. They have about the level of information I’ve come to expect from imported Asian MMORPG’s. It’s time to look for some wiki goodness…

The first Wikia site I see is a complete joke. Looks like somebody imported a bunch of data from the official site and stopped. The second one is not much better. Yup, two useless Wikia sites. Sigh. At least the second one has a newbie guide (which is just a list of what mobs to grind from level 1-19), but they don’t even have the imported data from the main site.

53%…

There we go. “Florensipedia” is what I was looking for. It’s slow, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was running off of a cheap VPS or a home DSL connection, but either way, it’s a wiki with useful stuff… but it likes to drop connections? Sigh. Not going to link there in the event that the weight of one more mighty anchor tag breaks them entirely.

I wasn’t able to find skill lists there either… this is kind of annoying now. I guess I’ll have to figure that all out in game. Oh well, they did confirm that I’m going to be very squishy and should probably heal often and put some stat points toward increasing my HP. I think I can manage to do that.

And I think I’ll just wait for the download to finish and pick up from there.

Installation and Startup

The total download was a hair over exactly 1.0gb. Decompressed

It’s a standard Nullsoft installer… but the default destination folder is “C:\Netts”… which… just… whatever. (Turns out NETTS is the original developing company). Let the game become installed! Here’s hoping that I don’t have to patch too much. It’s installing EU version 1.08.17, I wonder what’s current? The install page talks about making sure you download a current build so you don’t wind up having to patch forever… but I only saw one version available anyway

Hmm… all of the sound effects are standalone wav files. Those could be fun to play with… But not as much fun as the BGM mp3’s Looks like the game also installed 5 languages worth of localizations (English, Chinese/Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese). Queueing and playing some BGM before actually launching the game, just because I feel like it…

Happy pirate music! Yay!

Ok, now we attempt to launch.

Hmm, language selector on the patch client lists a bunch of European languages + Turkish as options.

The “Start” button does not work, but does not appear to be greyed out. It took some time for it to start patching, but it’s going now and looks like it will be a few minutes – but nothing worse than patching Everquest after not playing for a month or two.

Eventually, the patcher sped up, but it still took a few minutes.

And default run mode is 1024×768 windowed. Login screen is happy bouncy 80’s anime intro sort of instrumental. Something about highschool kids who can’t seem to make it to class on time and spend all their time embarrassedly wondering if so-and-so from class C likes them, etc…

Login server is not being very responsive. This is not promising. Closing and restarting… gave me a helpful dialog that says “Now Game Playing AllGameClose Launcher restart”, which clearly means… what?

The start button is not enabled, I wonder if it needs to patch more but is being slow about it? Hmm, no, it’s not doing anything. I’m pretty sure I’m not just being firewalled off for having a US IP or something like that, the patcher is displaying an American flag along with all of the European ones as part of its random animations…

I’m going to reboot my machine, just in case something got wedged somehow.

And that worked. Not sure what was up, but not going to worry much any more. It looks like the current build is 1.10.26, so not too far behind the binary from the download mirrors.

Logging in worked fine and I am given a choice of 3 servers to connect to. They’re labeled EU, US, and GER. I think I’ll stick with the US server. From there, I have a choice between worlds “English2″ and “Latin”. I’m half expecting them to ask me for my preferred character encoding next ;P

Hrm. The word “Checking” is hilited in red next to the languages. It won’t let me connect to them. I go back and look at the other regions and they list more servers with language indicators… and the “Checking” notice.

A quick search of the forums shows that this means the servers are in maintenance mode. Argh.

A further search of the forums shows that I’m actually attempting to connect in the middle of their weekly scheduled maintenance window. Double Argh. They block off 2-5 hours for these windows and likely only took the servers offline 40 minutes ago. Sigh.

I really am not going to get much time with this game. As a result, I think I’m going to post this review in two passes. This first part will contain the details of my first session, whenever that happens should be published somewhat normally.

The second pass (hopefully published in a day or two) will contain details of another session or two and my takeaway – and will likely just be appended to this post.

First Session

Haha! I just can’t win. They had extended maintenance today to work on a new system they are deploying (fleet warfare it seems?).

After the second maint window finally closed, there was yet another patch to the client… and I’m in! English2 is condition “Normal”. The client version number did not increment after this patch.

Receiving character information… Woo creation! New character… Noble… created. I am Land L 1, and Sea Lv 1. Yay localization. Connecting for the first time to the city of Roxbury.

I can click to move or WASD. The keyboard movement isn’t as smooth as I would like, so I am probably going to be clicking a bit after all.

An enormous flashing questionmark on the screen finally gets my attention. I click and am presented with the help system – which seems fairly informative. Chat is somewhat active, and it’s all in English so far

I walk over to the nearby questgiver and click him… and am assaulted with a full screen modal dialog on the meaning of questgiver icons. It takes a moment to realize that the only way to close the window is a goaway box in the NE corner.

Once the infernal window is gone, I have a normal JRPG style chat dialog. Big horizontal window along the bottom of the screen, buttons, portrait of the speaker. This guy totally subscribes to the Mad Hatter school of couture. The “Quest” chat option is blinking blue. I think I shall click it.

He provides me with a truncated list of quests – some of them are too long to fit in the space provided. Hmm, I suspect I’m going to encounter a lot of these issues where the translation is truncated for space.

And yup. The minute I click the first mission to get its details, there are clipped and strangely wrapped bits of dialog. Oh well, I’m going to stop mentioning these because I suspect I’ll get nowhere if I keep mentioning every one.

Going through the first several steps of the tutorial quests (these are your weapons, equip them; these are your stat points, spend them) provided exactly zero reward. The final reward is a few potions and an instruction to get ready for sea… but no real direction beyond that.

Mmm. I have Zero experience. That’s kind of novel for just having completed several (however trivial) quest objectives.

Looking at my quest journal, I need to talk to some guy named Stephen. It won’t let me track the mission, so I’m gonna have to wander town for the guy it seems. My other mission is to kill some mushrooms, but that’ll wait until I’ve done all of the talky quests.

Combining these two bits of information (“prep for sea”, “find Stephen”), I walked toward teh docks and successfully found the npc in question.

Ooh! Steve’s gonna help me make a boat Whee!

A few hiccups of clicking later and a full window appears, showing me a shipbuilding interface. Unfortunately, I’d clicked through the instructions to get to this point and there are no tooltips.

They give me a basic ship frame which I finally activate by right clicking (after failing to drag it into various boxes on the display).

Help dialogs show up to explain that my boat isn’t done yet – it needs a sail it seems. I suspect the dockmaster will give me one separately. Time to exit the building interface and talk to him again.

Sure enough, he gave me more pieces for my boat… and not just a sail. I’ve got a cannon and a floaty magic rock and stuff to add. It costs me 1g to assemble the ship from these parts and I appear to have a boat that can kill things now.

After a few more discussions with the dockmaster, he sends me back to the mad hatter for training on sea skills. Ooh! Click-to-move has basic pathing around corners.

Awesome. My reward for learning how to fire my cannons and heading back to the docks is a bunch of grilled squid to make my crew happier… and once again I am without anything to do… and I still don’t have any exp.

Hmm. Well, either I can set sail and blow things up, or I can go find those mushrooms I’m supposed to kill. To sea!

And after a bit of wandering, I shot a giant lobster and it sank me before I could return to port. Oh well. I think I’ll hunt those mushrooms after all. This suspicion is confirmed by the first NPC I see upon respawning in town – another quest to hunt mushrooms. Fine, I’ll do it.

Argh! Seriously? The first mob I see upon leaving town on foot is level 15. Level 5 giant lobsters in the water and level 15 giant frogs and lizards on land? Where are these newbie mushrooms already? Maybe I left out the wrong exit? Mumble.

Woo! While wandering town looking for the other exit, I found another questgiver (they are actually hilited on the map if you look closely). This one actually gave me 50 Land Exp for saying hi 25% to level 2…

Killed the first mushroom outside of town – 81 Land Exp. I’ll ding 2 off of the second kill here

Killing mushrooms. Killing mushrooms…

There is some combat lag when I activate my attack spell. I don’t know if it’s my network or machine or the server. Nobody else in the zone is complaining about it, however, so it’s probably on my end.

Almost dinged 3 off of the 8 kills for the first mushroom mission. Time to look for second quest’s mushrooms… It looks like mobs come in the standard 3 sizes here. You get the weak, normal, and strong varieties of each farmable mob. Additionally, I would be surprised if they didn’t occasionally spawn boss level versions of everything.

Level 4 from kills and I’ve completed the two kill quests and 1/3 of a drop quest (which I hope will continue dropping off of other things out there). Time to head back into town, turn in, and grab the skill books I couldn’t afford earlier.

Oh, nice. Shopping interface has a cart that you can confirm actions on. No accidental purchases is always a win.

So I can wield swords and little magical crystals. They started me with one of each. There are spells I can only cast when wielding a sword, but the sword itself doesn’t seem to do as much damage when autoattacking. This is likely the fault of my not having put any points into strength… but still. Also, the sword doesn’t increase my fireball damage, so I’m not very motivated to spend skill points on this sword-only skill tree. Will have to wait a few levels and see if maybe if it’s worth hot-swapping weapons in order to use the ability.

Hmm. Quest turnins weren’t worth very much. 1000 xp for two quests. I was earning 130 per kill of a level 2 mob. At least they gave me some cash for my trouble. I’m 44% to 5 now and am confident I’ll be able to afford my level 6 spells.

So far, all of the item drops I’ve had were for other classes, but now I’m off to slay dodos for some reason. Who needs quest text? Not me! Fireball! Level 5 dodo = 267 exp. Four of these are worth more than the quests I just turned in. Oh well.

It is possible to miss with spells. I guess my next couple of stat points are going into dex. Sigh.

Finishing this next pair of missions takes me 47% into level 5. New skills are unlocked at level 6. I think I’m just going to grind the strong dodos until 6 before returning to town (since I doubt the turnins will be worth enough to do the job). 316 xp for one of these guys vs 500 for the mission turnin? Sigh.

Ooh! I can change screen resolution. Looks like they support a good variety of options.

I have decent hp/mp regen out of combat and haven’t had to pause very many times. It appears that sitting down rapidly increases your regen rate (and it only takes a few seconds of sitting to regen all 600 of my mana, my fireball costs 43). Potions are abundant, but not spammable, so that’s nice. At first glance, I like the regen mechanics.

95% to 6, time to turn in and learn new toys. Hmm. The level 1 sword spell is actually a short term buff to increase sword damage. I’ll give it a whirl. New clothes and weapons available from vendor at level 5 means I’m dressed in blue in stead of red now. Ahh tinted equipment sets.

Upon talking to questgivers in town, they send me in circles around the entire city, talking to ever vendor two or three times… for a total of like 3% of a level. Sigh. After the dust settles, I have a few more missions back out of town, including one to kill some of the strong dodos I’d just finished grinding. Oh well.

I think I’m gonna go test out these new toys and then give seafaring another go.

Sigh. Skirts flip up when casting spells. What is this, Lineage 2? Mumble. Actually, it’s not quite so egregious as all that – it doesn’t hover for 5 seconds, etc… I only noticed it because of an accident of camera angles just now. In L2, it didn’t matter where the camera was, the frilly underthings were everywhere.

Hmm. Well, the iceball does damage like the previous rank of fireball, has a 6s cooldown, but lands a pretty good snare. It also looks like it might be a small AoE, but I’ve not seen any real evidence of this. The sword buff certainly makes swinging my sword worthwhile… but it doesn’t switch to autoattack when I open with a spell like my cariad (magical floaty rock weapon) does. This makes sense in that the sword is a melee weapon and autoattack would make me charge in… but it’s still a hair inconvenient I think.

After further experimentation, I disbelieve the tooltip. If iceball has any area component, it requires the mobs to be standing on top of each other. The snare component is strong enough, however, that it renders any notion of using a sword pretty moot. I can blast things of my level into ash before they come even vaguely close to melee range now. This is gratifying.

Spells queue (at least one item deep). It’s always refreshing to see a game get it right. If I press two buttons in a row, please wait until the first action is done before performing the second one. It’s nice, you can tap an attack spell while the animation for the first spell is going and it’ll just work without complaint.

And now back to the boat!

Actually, I think I’m going to try to buy a more durable ship this time around. I’ve got 4.1k in my pocket, and individual parts for entry level ships look pretty cheap. 186g total for a brand new level 1 ship, complete with some accessories I can’t equip until level 2. Sounds good. It cost 74g to repair my broken tutorial ship.

Much better this time around. It also helps that I found the level 1 and 2 mobs to fight. First kill was worth over 90% of a level. Looting corpses at sea is difficult, and of the four kills I got, two of the corpses disappeared before I could loot them. The other two didn’t drop anything worth the trouble. I dinged 3 for my trouble and had 14g in repair costs when I arrived at port… which qualifies me for a quest to go sink some pirates, and one to harvest the big lobsters

And I think that’ll have to wait for later.

Initial Takeaway

So far, I’m a little impressed. The game is playable and interesting. It lets you get to the seafaring right away – even if the system is a bit difficult to learn. Land-based combat doesn’t disappoint me, it’s much better than it could have been.

I didn’t get a chance to try my hand at fishing since it costs a precious skill point – and I spent my one experimental point so far on the rapier skill. I’ll try fishing tomorrow if I get a chance.

The chat channel is very active, and most of it is the inane drivel of kids who shouldn’t be allowed on the internet. There was guild posturing and name calling and people with names like “sn1per” and “ipwnzu”. Really, it’s everything else you’d expect from the lowbie zones of a free-to-play MMO that has active players.

All told, everything is largely predictable, but nothing is so horrible that I dread my next session or two. In fact, I’m only quitting right now so I can get to work on time

Fallen Earth is not free to play, and it is not in beta any more. But it was on sale for 50% off last week, so that – combined with the recent comments I’ve been reading on GamerDNA was good enough for me.

Well, that, and there were 15-day trial keys available from The Escapist last weekend. So… close enough

Week 4: Fallen Earth

I’d tried FE near the end of their beta cycle… and hated it. The controls were brittle and confusing. It was easy to inadvertently unwield your weapons, etc… and I died twice and never finished the intro. The experience was frustrating enough that I played the game for two hours before giving up on it entirely.

Thankfully, they’ve fixed a LOT since then. It’s playable. There are still some rough edges, but they’re manageable.

Unlike the previous games I’ve looked at, Fallen Earth is actually rated M (17+) for subject matter and language. I have not encountered anything overtly objectionable yet, and the violence is downright cartoonish for an M title these days, but it’s a harsh wilderness out there…

This might read a bit differently from my previous mmo-a-week reports because I didn’t actually take notes this time – I was too busy just playing the game Also, I played equally on two different machines, so my screenshots are in two different resolutions (some are full 1920×1080 HD behemoths), so be warned when you click.

Registration and Download

Well, the download was trivial. Steam handled all the work for me on that front. The total disk space requirement so far is 5.2gb after patching, so expect a wait if you’re on a slow link.

Registration was fairly simple as well. I logged into the official site and added my serial and billing info to my old beta account, and that was that.

Installation and Startup

Patching… did not go as smoothly. Steam has a problem with launching the updater on the machine I played on initially (64-bit Vista), and complained of the game being “unavailable”. A bit of searching later, led me to learn that I could just launch the patch client directly and everything was fine (\\Steam\\SteamApps\\common\\fallen earth\\FEUpdater.exe).

It worked fine directly from Steam when I installed again later on a different (32-bit XP) machine, so YMMV.

Steam also gave me a bonus item serial that was easy enough to redeem in game. I just waited until after the tutorial and typed /key to bring up the serial submission form. This wasn’t entirely obvious initially, and I tried to apply the code through the web site – where it told me that the serial looked valid but should probably be submitted in game (but didn’t say how). A quick query to the ubiquitous Help channel later and all was revealed.

Research and Waiting

I didn’t actually do any research before playing this time around, I just jumped in and let the game teach me what it would.

The general backstory is almost textbook post-apocalyptia:

~30 years from now, the big uber corporation’s tech is ready. Fully functional clone system with live neural backup sync to the server is unveiled. The US government promptly moves to ban the tech but the legislation does not pass. Eventually the company grows sufficiently large and powerful that they declare sovereignty in northwestern Arizona.

~45 years from now, the Shiva Virus (seriously, it’s always either Shiva or Chimera…) wipes out what it doesn’t mutate. And whatever survives the nukes. Asia is wiped out. The United States falls. Cloning stations are distributed throughout the Grand Canyon Province (one of the last bastions of civilization on the planet).

~60 years from now, the Hoover Dam is taken by some military types who expel the corporation and establish a martial society. Clones start being farmed for organs and other such pleasantness. The dynasty is passed on to the General’s son.

~100 years from now, the Children of the Apocalypse (CHOTA) rise as survivors of the virus who have reverted to a primitive level of society. CHOTA eat funny mushrooms and refuse to play nice with the neighbors.

~115 years from now, the second General is killed and the dynasty passes on. New management is a complete nut job with anger management issues who succeeds in alienating himself from everyone. CHOTA attack the Dam and he decides to blow it up in response. The player stops this from happening but does not survive the process. In a petty fit of revenge, Sr. Crazypants wipes the servers (with all of the clones’ nerual maps) in stead. They did not have a good offsite backup strategy.

4 years later, the player wakes up in a fresh, level 1 body.

The year is 2156 and we’re gonna hunt mutant chickens with a 2×4.

First Session

There is nothing to character creation other than the choice of a name and physical appearance. The game is entirely skill and equipment based. Character levels don’t even matter very much except as a minimum gage of how many skill points (AP, advancement points?) one has accumulated and as a baseline for all of your stats.

The initial tutorial introduces you to most of the game’s important systems – and starts you off at level 40 to make you big enough to render accidental death rather unlikely. It shows you how to walk around and scavenge from garbage piles and spend AP, puts you in a handful of combat – and combat avoidance situations, makes you interact with npc’s (questgivers, other conversers, and merchants), and forces you to drive an ATV while under fire.

The tutorial continues after you respawn at level 1, and while this is optional, I encourage you to stick with it. The sequence of immediate missions you’re given rewards you with a number of abilities, some much needed equipment upgrades, and a horse.

It’s not a good horse, but it beats walking. Horses are vehicles, just like motorcycles and the like. The primary difference (aside from top speed, storage capacity, and the like) seems to be that a medic can heal a horse while it takes a mechanic to fix a busted up ATV. Horses eat grain, vehicles drink gas.

Vehicles are persistent objects as long as the owner is logged in. When you mount your horse and ride across town, you leave your horse outside and must come back to it if you want to get back on. There is none of the standard MMO’s magical summoning action going on. If you ride your horse deep into the wasteland to dig copper and wind up getting eaten by a giant stink bug in stead, well… you will respawn in town and your horse won’t.

You now have the decision of either walking out to your horse (which is thankfully marked with a waypoint on the map) or of getting it towed back to the garage/stables like you would a busted old truck

Speaking of “spawning”, you are a clone. You’re a little bit mutant, but mostly you’re just a normal person who happens to have their brain constantly syncing back to the server. When you die, it sends a signal that wakes up the people printer. A few moments later, assuming the vats contain enough biomass to work with, you’re standing in town, more or less the same as before you died. You lose buffs and probably have some walking to look forward to, but there is otherwise not really any death penalty at early levels. You keep all of your gear (which isn’t explained by the game’s lore, but I’ll accept that little freebie).

Every 10% of a level, you earn 2 AP. AP may be spent either 1 at a time on a handful of core skills or 5 at a time on your basic stats. Stats do a few of the expected things but mostly just determine caps (and baseline values) of associated skills. In addition to the 20 AP per level, you can also earn a number of AP directly from missions. It is estimated that there are almost 300 bonus AP available in the game right now and that max level characters will likely have accumulated about 200 of them.

Tradeskills (geology, science, cooking, etc…) are all improved by use and their caps are all determined by the same stats, so it is entirely possible to max out every tradeskill in the game on one character. Recipes are learned in sets, and it is not a bad idea to pick up every cheap (10c) recipe book you encounter.

The actual crafting process takes RL time. You can queue up items to be produced as long as you’re carrying the ingredients and the required tools for production and can then go about your business or log out of the game completely. There is no furniture requirement for crafting, but if you do decide to hang out in an appropriate facility, there is like a 25% speed increase – which can really add up when producing big items with multiple hour crafting times. But this also means you can make bandages or ammo in the field without much penalty.

One of the core activities of the game is scavenging. You loot the corpses you kill, but you can also dig for ore or sift through trash or harvest cacti. With the right skills and tools, you can also actually harvest meat and more valuable components from a giant lizard in stead of simply ripping off one of its teeth as vendor trash. Crafting and scavenging reward experience, so it is theoretically possible for a character to avoid combat as a rule and still earn the AP required to advance and learn to craft bigger and better things – though I suspect that’s the sort of thing that is better left to an alt

My character is currently wearing pants that were manufactured from a combination of: lizard skins, scavenged grommets, cactus fibers, and dye condensed from some plant or another. A total of four tradeskills were involved in the manufacturing and the whole process felt completely intuitive. I didn’t set out to farm mats for the pants, it just sort of occurred to me that I’d likely gathered enough junk to make something useful, so I walked to the armourcrafting trainer and asked for a copy of his entry level pantscrafting manual and was pleased to realize I had the materials on hand and was only a skill point or two away from replacing the shorts I had dug out of a trash pile on the edge of town.

Something like over 90% of the items in the game are craftable in this way. Even horses – it is not difficult to train your own mount once you have the right knowhow. Player-crafted persistent housing is officially planned but is neither implemented nor impending.

My first marathon session ended at around level 3 (60+ AP). I had talked with a lot of people (of the RL variety, the game’s Help channel is very active), investigated a disturbance in a mine, acquired a used horse, learned that crossbows stink in melee, scavenged more junk than I could carry, made a guy a sandwich, and treated a lot of NPC’s who’d been injured or infected or envenomed for one reason or another.

Other Sessions

My second big session saw me actually exploring away from the town I started in (there are like 12 options for starter towns in the first sector of the game).

The game world is currently divided into 3 sectors, 10 are planned. Each sector contains about 15 levels worth of content. So the current level cap is 45, and the planned cap is 150. Again, levels don’t really mean much more than the accompanying AP. One of the big towns in S1 is “Kingman”, which I assume really is meant to be the ruins of the present day NW Arizona city. The other towns have familiar sounding names… but don’t necessarily have RL analogues.

In addition to the standard minimap, you have a “strategic map”, which defaults to basically just a bigger minimap. On a large enough monitor, you can see quite a bit of the area around you. The map may be toggled out of overhead view to show you a paper map of your sector. Sector 1 shows the 20 something settlements, old freeways, and assorted scribbles. It’s a nice thematic touch and is still useful enough to get you between cities. There’s no fog of war for this sort of thing, you have a paper map.

I hit level 4 while wandering the wastes – if you get far enough away from the roads, nothing much at all seems to spawn, but the roads cover most of the region so that doesn’t seem to matter all that much.

I died a few times, but that didn’t bother me much – since there’s a spawn location in every town and my horse served as a nice marker for my exploration and scavenging.

About this time, when I started to get really comfortable with the game’s combat and started making what felt like real progress, I almost expected to hear Three Dog kick in with news updates on the radio.

The world isn’t as dense as Fallout 3’s… which really is to be expected. If the content were that thick, so too would be the players, and it’s bad enough dealing with 8 other guys crowded around the bank vault at the same time without having to compete with those same 8 all camping Tenpenny’s spawn on that blasted narrow penthouse balcony…

I eventually realized that aimless wandering wasn’t going to get me much of anywhere – no exp for riding around in circles and decided that I needed to get back on task. I decided to follow up on the main storyline quest (which recommended level 5+ and wasn’t kidding, it was rough at level 4 without a heavy combat focus) and wound up collecting tissue samples from assorted species in the area with a deadline. Had I managed to stay alive the entire time, it would have been much easier, but dying meant walking, meant the 30 minute limit actually felt pretty tight.

Somewhere about this time, I won a goofy trivia challenge and was awarded with a pretty sweet rifle. Too bad it requires 75 skill to use, I have like 26. I stuffed it in a vault to prevent myself from accidentally vendoring it.

Once I hit level 5, I heard other players talking about building an ATV – which I remembered talking to an NPC about once when buying feed for my horse. The thought of motorized transit intrigued me, so I set off in search of the first mission of the story arc that would lead me to learn how to build my own vehicle. I delivered some records to another town on behalf of the bank, rescued a lost girl from the hills outside of town, killed bandits impersonating pony express types, and eventually stumbled across an encrypted book.

Raising my science skill and hunting down the encryption key allowed me to decipher the book and taught me how to build a transmission While scavenging parts for the transmission – all of which I had possessed at one point in time but either spent making crossbow bolts or grenades or the aforementioned pants – I decided that it was time to get a better horse, since the level requirement for the final mission in the ATV chain is apparently 11 or 12.

I had already acquired enough nature skill and spare chips (yes, the currency is in poker chips) to start on a very nice horse upgrade right away. So that was pleasant. I parked my nag in the stables and rode off on something with about 5x the stamina and suddenly found myself able to travel between nearby towns without having to stop to feed the blasted horse every single trip.

The final assembly time on the transmission was something like 4 hours, so I logged out in the garage and called it a night.

Gameplay

Combat is really my only gameplay complaint with this game. It spends 90% of its time in a standard western style MMO interface, and the other 10% as a sort of mutant FPS… thing.

The tab key or middle mouse button toggles you in and out of combat, and changes your mouse cursor to a targeting reticle. If you choose to, you can make the game auto-switch into first person mode when in combat. I’ve chosen and tend not to regret the decision – I’ve only been jumped from behind three times as a result of dropping into first person for better combat control… and have only died twice as a result

You can equip a number of weapons on your person for ready access… you have 6 slots in total, so a standard sort of loadout might be two strings of grenades and a pair of pistols at your waist and a sword and a rifle over your back. Switching weapons is done via the Ctrl key + either your mouse wheel or the 1-6 keys. In most fights, I wind up switching at least once. While killing the fraudulent postal employees, I managed to cycle through all of my weapons in order to keep up with everything (since I was low on each type of ammo before starting the mission).

This whole system really takes some getting used to. Once in combat, it isn’t quite FPS. So while you have to aim shots at your moving opponents, there is an average level of MMO standard client-server sync latency to deal with, so a lag burst can make you miss a shot at a moving target and have to endure a few seconds of beatdown while you reload. It is also not uncommon to get stabbed by guys who haven’t quite entered melee range on your screen. There is also no “alternate fire” option – left button is shoot left hand, right button is shoot right hand (if you’re using a two-handed weapon, either button does the same thing).

On the up side, you have an MMO style actionbar to chug pills and activate specials from. You are a mutant, so you have some super powers, but initially, they aren’t much to write home about. There are separate stamina and “gamma” bars for fueling your normal combat specials and your mutant powers. Gamma powers are more powerful, but gamma also appears to regenerate a bit more slowly.

There are a lot of stance/aura and short buff sort of abilities to be had, and the combinations are nice. You can also get buffs from food and drink like one would expect from a modern western MMO. These make a huge difference in survivability, and I highly recommend acquiring a few of the cheaper ones as soon as possible. Even the lowest grade of craftable food (vegetable “relish” of all things) is something like 1 stamina per 6 second regen buff that lasts an hour, and an extra several stamina points might make a big difference.

Outside of combat, everything works how you would expect. The user interface is very flexible – everything can be dragged around and resized as desired.

Art and Music

You know… I don’t even know if the game HAS music. Huh. Never really thought about it. Would not be surprised if they don’t. I’ll have to check now…

Time passes while the game patches and I wait to log in…

Ok, sure enough, there is some occasional light background music. Nothing abrasive, nothing amazing. Just music to keep things from being completely silent. A little western ambiance. I like it.

The art is bog standard desert wasteland with rusted out cars, abandoned houses, and crumbling highways. But it’s not low grade by any means. And there are times where the cleverness of the level design and art team shines through. The animations are pretty standard, and while some of them are slower than I’d like (reloading a crossbow and mounting a horse take -forever-), they work.

The game has a day/night cycle. The stars aren’t very impressive, but the sunset/sunrise effects are jaw dropping (in context). Static screenshots do not do them justice. And they’re apparently a bit different every “day”. Every morning, players comment about the visual. Having lived in Arizona for approximately a decade, I can confirm that anyone else who’s ever witnessed a desert sunrise/sunset would have immediately disbelieved anything less awesome than what they delivered.

Oh, and it’s just the visual of the stars that isn’t terribly impressive (they look like planets). But they are actually astronomically correct. You can find constellations in the right parts of the sky as one would expect to see them from Earth.

Stability and Performance

Other than the issues with launching via Steam on my Vista box, I’ve not had any problems. The client has never crashed or completely lagged out on me. The help line is full of people complaining of one bug or another, for which the standard response is to relog. I’ve never had to do so.

Well, correction. I did get hit with a poison visual effect that wouldn’t go away, once… but out of the dozens and dozens of times I’ve been poisoned, one visual glitch is pretty minor. I did eventually relog to get rid of it, but it didn’t impact game performance by any means.

On both machines, I enjoyed an average of 30 fps with spikes up into the 50’s and the very very rare drop down to 14-15 range (but I think that was my machine doing something else in the background).

There is no latency (ping) display available in the game, but I only rarely experienced anything that impacted my gameplay. Once or twice, I saw chickens warp 10 or 20 feet, but this never happened to me while in combat. Some other players complained of this sort of behavior on a much broader scale, to the point where they accused the chickens of being warp tainted by Tzeentch

While the game doesn’t give a latency display, they do offer the refreshing option to display bandwidth usage. Most times, my bandwidth display measured less than 0.05K/s in either direction. The highest downstream spike I ever observed was to 3, and that was upon approaching a heavily populated town (with like 30-40 players milling about if I had to guess). I never observed very high upstream use. I’m assuming this number is in kilobytes, not kilobit. So that would be about 400 bytes per second on the low end up to only 24 kilobit on the high end (which means that like 8 people could probably play at once on the worst DSL connection money can buy).

Final Grade

From completely panning the game 4 months ago, this is a complete turnaround for me. I’m giving the game a 9 based on my experiences so far. They’re clearly paying attention to bug reports and have a very involved community. The game is steadily improving and is quite possibly even worth the subscription fee

Afterthoughts

I’m blown away with the improvements. Fallen Earth went from being a completely forgettable, poorly implemented, derivative attempt at a hybrid shooter/mmo to being a downright immersive sandbox mmorpg. I like it. I plan on playing regularly for the duration of my “free” month and will decide whether or not to continue the subscription based on the content they announce for January.

Oh, and I can make gunpowder. Now if only I knew how to wield a rifle

What’s Next?

Not sure. I’m in one closed beta and am signed up for another one that I really hope I get into. If I can’t find anything terribly interesting tomorrow, I’ll probably be taking another whack at the first random kMMO that accosts me with a banner ad. Maybe Florensia? Dunno.

Sorry I was 9 minutes late according to blog clock, but I took my time sifting through and retaking screenshots. It’s still the Wednesday here in California though

So this time around was rough picking a game. After a lot of internal debate, the deciding has been made.

Lunia Chronicles just launched this week and has some good things going for it, but it looks like another goofy footed wrist breaker in the vein of Dragonica and I’m still healing from week 1. But they have SLIME as an unlockable character class… No. I will resist. The lure of bashing heads as a baby slime is strong, but not strong enough. Maybe next month.

Week 3: Ether Saga Online

No, it had to be a traditional click-to-move Korean style MMO. After all, that’s what I said I’d be playing for this series and I’ve not done one yet. The strongest initial contender was Ether Saga Online in light of their recent parenting award. That’s enough news of interest to give the game a chance.

Other candidates were games I’d seen in banner ads this week… but after a bit of googling to see what gameplay looked like, this music video (to Usher’s “Yeah!”) was the deciding factor this time around. If the characters are that expressive in game, I can’t help but try. Ether Saga it is.

Registration and Download

So let’s get down to it. The front page assaults me with lots of twitchy animations. Seriously? Jpeg compression artifacts in flash? Sigh. That’s just plain lazy. However, underneath the animation, I see what I’m looking for. Big obvious registration/download links.

Let’s start the download before registering this time, just because. Ooh! They have an official torrent. I do believe we have a winner. Total payload will be 1.8gb (they keep getting bigger!). Torrent is started, I’ll check back on it after registration is complete.

Actual registration link was smaller than the art led me to believe. Regardless, I found it. Hmm… Security question. Mandatory name & birthday survey (but at least it’s marked as mandatory). Tooltip next to the personal information survey says that it’s to expedite setting up billing should I choose to give them money, which makes sense, but is a touch annoying.

Click. Click. Registered. And checking back on download.

20 minute ETA? Hehehehe. I love torrents. 16 seeds, 2 peers. Downloading at 1.6Mbps

Research and Waiting

This won’t be much of a wait it seems, so I need to hurry.

Ok, the official site has an Mediawiki install with a good mix of info. The main site’s guides are pretty standard kmmo portal randomness. I’ll stick with the wiki, the static site is making my brain itch.

Journey to the West references. There’s a good safe theme for a game I wonder if they’ll actually reference the stories or just use that as a shortcut to identify the general setting?

Three races with Chinese characters for names. Sigh, my Chinese is so bad. Ren = person, and that’s clearly the character, and the race is generic human. Shenzu… Shen means god (I think) and the race is demigod. Yaoh? No idea there. Looks like they’re animal spirits or something.

Oh my. They have a set of “Nascent” skills chosen by the combination of a character’s birthday and race. They all look like either long cooldown bombs or passives. Regardless, I bet whatever one(s) I wind up with will be useful.

Six classes. Rogue, Ranger, Dragoon. Shaman, Conjurer. Mystic. That’s kind of a nice change. Actual choice. The physical classes look like exactly what you’d expect from their names. Dragoon is a fun choice for the game’s basic tank class. Shamans look like hybrid healer/tanks. Conjurer is the offensive caster, Mystic is the defensive. As funny as it would be to pick Ranger for a third game in a row… I think I’ll have to pass this time.

Torrent finished…

Ok, it doesn’t look like a lot of abilities granted by the class, also evidence that level advancement will be rapid – which will be a nice change. I like regularly scheduled cookies. I think I’ll go with a Shenzu Shaman. They wear heavy armour and wield big mallets Looks like their main heal is just a regen buff. That’s actually viable in this format. Normally direct heals with casting times in a kmmo are worthless given the potion economy. I <3 regen.

ooOoohOhooh! Everyone gets a pet. Win Looks like you can pokemon them and some (like rangers) are better at it than others. Initial glance makes pets look a lot like Megaten’s system. I liked that. Here’s to hoping it’s similar but better.

And I think I’m done procrastinating. Time to plug this thing in and see what breaks!

Installation and Startup

The installer is not standard. It provided a strange (and potentially broken?) destination folder dropdown that confused me. I’m not sure what it would have done had I just clicked through, so I manually specified a destination path in stead.

After a bit of waiting, I get a more standard full screen installer and a EULA splash page… with some sort of non-necessarily-latin character set font. The taskbar icon’s menu reveals to me that the installer program is probably Chinese.

Ahaha! The first destination folder was actually where to extract the installer files to… I choose to -really- install to the default location, complete with ego folder.

They then ask me if I want to verify the installer… but they do it in a slightly scary way:

There may have been data lost during transmission. Do you want to verify the data to ensure successful installation?

Umm, yes? Ok, if you feel so strongly about it, I’ll verify… I guess.

The validation process actually ran quickly and the normal install finally started automatically after that. It’s a pretty traditional full-screen installer with stretched bitmaps of concept art from the game in the background.

When installation finally completes, it provides me with another dialog:

SERIOUSLY? You want me to crc your files AGAIN? As the default option? Wow. What kind of tcp/smoke-signals sort of network do they expect we’re running on?

Also, I kind of thought that patch clients are usually responsible for validating game data at launch. 10 to 1 the patcher runs a full scan once I launch it… and 100 to 1 that there’s a patch to be downloaded that obsoletes all of this data integrity paranoia anyway.

While watching the second checksum pass, it is revealed that they have some files with names in Chinese characters

Once I actually launch the launcher, it asks me to configure its patcher behavior. It seems you can tell it -not- to automatically patch? Huh. Regardless, I’m clicking everything… and sure enough, there was another patch. And it asked me three times if I wanted to do something about it – despite having just told the thing to patch automatically… AND they have a default option to manually select which patch mirror to download from… and even AFTER I tell it to just get on with things (this is my 7th or 8th dialog at this point), they ask me if I am really really really sure and don’t I really just want to get the patch by hand from the website.

I really wish people would serve freshly patched versions of their clients…

No, I’m using the patcher… and it looks like it is going to take a while. I’m gonna eat lunch and come back to this.

40 minutes later, it is finally done patching, I hope.

Awesome. The torrent I downloaded was version 81 of the game. Patcher updated me to version 162.

Now they give me a System Settings dialog with various graphics options. The game wants to default into 800×600 full screen. No thanks, I’ll see how things look at max res at 1280×800 windowed with everything turned up.

I click the big Game Start button… and it asks me to select a server first. After looking around – and ignoring the flashing Server Status images, I finally notice the unadorned combobox below Game Start where I can select West Coast or East Coast. The servers have names according to the site, but I guess location is good enough. West Coast start now?

First Session

Ok, pretty Chinese music and MotD. After Alganon last week, words fail me with how nice it is to see UI that someone actually took some effort on.

Hmm. The music cut off before I got to character creation and hasn’t kicked up again. A quick test says that my machine’s still making noise, so it’s just the game client. Oh well.

Character creation was smooth standard sort of interface with good responsiveness on changing out models. I have my Shenzu Shaman ready for action, complete with a little pet monkey/cat hybrid thing and a birthday and zodiac sign chosen.

… wow.

This is unapologetically pretty. I love the background music – even if it is just standard Asian fantasy ambiance so far. Everything is shiny and crisp, with smooth animations and nice (but not amazing) UI components.

People are chatting in some funny language I don’t recognize, but whatever Ahh. I think I am guessing Portuguese plus some internet slang/abbreviations. Ahh. Yup. Confirmed and someone asked me if I knew Portuguese. I responded that I knew only Japanese

Apparently my pet is a Baby Maotu Longtail and the click-to-move marker is a cute little pawprint. This is going to be fun.

Everything stops animating when you click out of the window, but music continues. When you click back in the window, it interprets that as an instruction to the client and not a reacquisition of focus… so accidentally walking somewhere is going to happen to me a lot, I can feel it.

I finally decide that it is time to start playing and talk to the glowing quest npc in the middle of the room. Apparently I am the chosen one, descended from on high to the lower plane to save the world and blah blah blah. There is a brief voiceover that sounds Chinese every time I click on some npc’s, and I’m clicking on a lot. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Before I know it, I’ve run laps around this opening region and have dinged my way to level 12 off of “go talk to this guy” sort of quests. One of my tutorial quests was to kill three level 1 flower plants, which I one-shotted by this point…

They gave me my first Nascent ability. Apparently my birthday qualifies me for Dark Ritual at level 10. The power itself actually restores 30% of my (or I assume a friendly target’s) mana. I find the irony delicious. These abilities actually have shorter cooldowns than initial research lead me to believe. This one is on a 30s cooldown – but it has a cost in “Vigor”, which is like a very slowly regenerating stamina stat (I also have Mana and some other meter that I haven’t figured out yet). The cost is sufficiently high that I can use the ability on about 4 successive cooldowns but am then pretty much locked out for a few minutes before I can use it again… the irony of which also amuses me.

Finally around level 13, they decide to stop giving me free exp and I look at my quest journal to decide where to go next. Hmm, go to town? Ok. I walk past a wide variety of mobs, none of which are aggressive so far… and can eventually see town. I kill a few things and earn 20-30 exp per kill. I need a few thousand to ding 14. Ahh. Now THIS is the experience I was expecting

I stop killing and walk in to town to try to turn in the one mission that led me here. The minimap icons are confusing. There is an apparent profusion of quest availability, but some of the guys are moving and the map is just a sea of colorful dots. These guys don’t give out free levels. I talk to several guys who do send me fedex around town a bit, but for relatively zero reward. Mostly, the npc dialogs are confusing – it’s hard to identify which are quests and which are just guys wanting to exposit my ear off.

Graphically, there are a lot of classic Chinese mythological tropes all over the place. Everything really does feel very 16th century fantasy China.

Eventually, I find quests sufficient to fill my book. Oh look. Directed grinding. Well, it’s better than nothing. I set out to actually kill things. Thinking I’m clever, I stack up on missions to kill the same groups of mobs, but it turns out I only get credit for one quest per kill, even if I have three missions to kill the same guys. Oh well.

Combat is pretty standard, though I don’t have a lot of actions to choose from. They -do- however have macros for automated spell cycles, which should be interesting. The system is a bit confusing and I think the interface could be improved, but it works. You can even set the macro on auto-repeat by slotting a repeat action BEFORE the sequence of abilities you want to cycle. My cycle is pretty simple: spell attack, melee attack.

A lot of the advancement is non-standard. Every 5th level you are given 5 points to spend on your elements. These are affinities for the 5 classic Chinese elements that seem to have a relationship to your spell damage output and resistance as well as random stat modifiers. I started with 3 in all elements and spent my first batch of 5 on increasing everything to 4. From there, I spent as many points in wind as they would let me (they call it Winra or something dumb like that – but not as bad as metal which they call Oora, likewise fire is Pyra, etc…). My remaining points went into earth at the time. Wind seems to be a caster stat and apparently most of my spells are wind based. Earth seems to be the tank stat. Sounds good enough for now.

You don’t learn new abilities from a trainer or when you level up. You purchase them from your skill page with points that you earn directly from kills. The mobs directly adjacent to my newbie spawn point weren’t worth any of these “spirit” points, but once I got any distance away, I started killing things worth 2-3 each. First few ranks of low level abilities cost 30-100 points, so there is a clear incentive for short bursts of grinding to get these points.

After a bit more quest and spirit grinding later, I had every rank of every ability available to my level 14 self. They added a large attack with a 5 second cooldown and a brief heal over time. I updated my main macro to open with the big nuke, cast, cast, cast, hot, repeat. Against mobs of equal or greater level, this kept me topped off until I ran out of mana. A brief spot of meditation later (or tapping my Dark Ritual), I can resume the incessant grind.

The game also has a transformation mechanic. It seems that many (most? all?) mobs are valid transformation targets. There is a very low chance per kill of a mob dropping a card that teaches you the ability to transform into them. Most of these cards have limited uses – but the transformation itself is of unlimited duration, so 50 charges really do last a long time. One of the flurry of newbie tutorial quests explains all of this and gave me a card, but I wasn’t paying attention at the time. It lets me turn into a frog who is apparently fire element attuned and also counts as a different creature type (my default of course being humanoid).

Just like the 5 elements have the whole paper-rock-scissors relationship with each other, so do creature types. There are apparently 9 of these, and one of the major benefits to transformation is setting yourself up to do 1.5-2x damage to your enemy. Double damage means half the grind time… add 2x exp potions to it… and it might actually become feasible to advance levels.

And as if that wasn’t enough random systems, all players have combat pets. They have the classic hunger money sink built in so you can unsummon your pet if you can’t afford to keep them happily fed. It looks like every mob in the game might be pokemonsters. You can use nets on them once you’ve damaged them, etc… Pets may or may not learn abilities as they advance in levels and they can also be taught abilities via scroll sort of items. Mobs have creature types and elemental affinities so you can use them to focus your damage types considering what you’re farming as well.

Players start with one pet (based on race) and are given an “unidentified” pet during opening quests. There is a tax of sorts to id pets and reveal their stats. I’m not sure entirely what this means because I can use the new pet w/o any apparent disadvantages.

In addition to summoning a pet as normal, you can also “fuse” with them to split damage taken. I think this is one of the game’s primary tanking mechanics – and I would not be surprised if your fused pet variety impacts your damage taken (ie, pick something resistant to the types of damage you’re taking, etc…). I do not think fused pets can use their abilities.

It was a good, long session. I wish the exp rate hadn’t just switched off upon leaving newbieland, but after a bit of struggling, I was able to hit level 15.

I wasn’t able to find time for any other meaningful sessions after the first big one, but doubt that I would have seen much else of interest during them.

Gameplay

The gameplay is precisely what one would expect from a free-to-play, click-to-move MMO with optional WASD. The grind is long and predictable, with very little one can do to soothe it outside of exp rate potions and the like. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Apart from behavior when tabbing out of the game window and back, things are polished and reliable. You have the control you need to get the job done and are given a surprising array of options. Unlike some of the older offerings in the genre, players really do have a wild variety of choice to impact their growth and abilities. I wouldn’t say that the game is as flexible as say DoMO, but it is absolutely more flexible than something like Ragnarok.

I don’t have very many gripes with the game, but those I do have count for something.

First, the game’s general ui was obviously created with some care… originally. There are a few rough edges and quirks that could use some polishing and would thus make things go smoother. NPC chat dialogs are lacking – it is difficult to identify whether a dialog options is quest-related, is some sort of trade/service selection, or is just world flavour text. This makes finding missions difficult. Likewise, the game has a lot of good help available while playing, and has the obligatory tutorial tooltips that nag you to read relevant system documentation when you encounter it… but there is a lack of consistency that leads me to believe that the system was just tacked on after the fact.

Second, the combo system is great but clunky. It suffers from that same “almost there” sort of ui issue. As near as I can tell, it is impossible to either name combos or delete an action from a combo once it has been slotted. Your best bet is to delete and try again. There is no feedback for when a combo starts or finishes, and there is certainly no feedback when a combo aborts for one reason or another.

Third, the rate at which complexity is layered on top of complexity serves as a barrier to entry. Spirit and elements for advancement, but not every level and not necessarily when you level. Oh, and spirit is also used as a currency when upgrading equipment – but then again, so is “treasure” which is an upgrade-only sort of currency that you get transparently in the background while doing everything else. Pets must be identified, but can be used w/o identification. Creature types and elemental types of attacks create this wild net of damage multipliers that can either benefit you strongly or kick you in the teeth w/o warning if you don’t understand them. It would be much better to introduces all of these systems one at a time time, but since the initial orgy of level advancement force feeds you all of this information at such a dizzying pace, you’re bound to miss most of it.

Art and Music

What can I say? I’m a sucker for this kind of art. It is clean and original and anime-inspired. The character costumes and animations are all very well done and the cash shop offerings look like they’d be a lot of fun. In the time it took me to walk to town, I did not encounter one reskinned mob type. Everything was weird and different. Sure there were rat men and killer saplings like you would expect, but I also fought giant animated coins and giant insane mine worker types with bombs in their backpacks and rabbit head hats.

Skill animations are huge, over the top light shows that make it impossible to miss what’s going on

The music is nice and pleasant, and fits the theme perfectly. It’s the kind of music I wish I could find as mp3’s lying around the game data directories – but alas, it’s packed away somewhere

Stability

I didn’t have any problems once the game got up and running. I never got disconnected and never had problems authenticating.

Final Grade

Ether Saga Online is a good, cute game. It is more playable than a lot of the competition, but suffers from a slightly less than perfect localization and overmuch complexity. The grind sets in fast and is disappointingly slow once you get started – even with exp potions on board. For what it is, and in consideration of my expectations, I give the game an 8 out of 10. You could do a lot worse with your free-to-play time.

Afterthoughts

I’m not really sure why Ether Saga was honored alongside Wizard 101 – which I view to be perhaps the ultimate kid friendly MMO. It is a good solid game with a lot of depth and a lot of play time, but there is nothing absolutely mindblowing about it that screams after my wallet. If my toddler were 10 years older, I’d totally be playing Wizard 101 with her, but would probably not give Ether Saga a second thought.

What’s Next?

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I’ve got a few closed beta opportunities to choose from right now, so I think I am going to pursue one of those for now. No game is explicitly planned for review next week, but you never know, something might jump out at me and earn a quick once-over.

When I was kicking off my research for this project, I read up a bit on Massively. One of the games they were talking about a good bit at the time was Alganon… and one item of particular interest was that they were launching open beta on Nov 11th. I figured that was sufficiently coincidental and added it to the calendar

I’m starting a day late (Nov 12th) because of aforementioned deadness on the 11th.

Registration and Download

Well, it’s supposed to be an open beta in its first week, and they’re advertising it rather prominently on the site. I expect this process to be comparatively painless. Big “Beta Signup” buttons look promising… and the form they led to was quick and painless. There is an email validation step, but I didn’t have to wait more than a few seconds for it to send out.

Upon completing validation and logging in to the portal, they take me directly to a page that contains all manner of everything I want to see:

• Server status.
• Beta disclaimer.
• Download link.
• Patch notes.
• In that order.

They offer both a downloader and a direct link. I’ll try their downloader since it looks like a targetted downloader and not a generic download manager like the Dragonica one seemed to imply last week. Downloader prompts for password (I assume the direct link also has some auth and would thus be a bit tricky to run through a 3rd party dl manager).

The total payload is 1.5gb, after which I will probably have to run the installer separately. No big deal there. It’s coming down at >130Kb/s so will take about 3.5 hours if it can maintain this rate. A bit of poking shows that the transfer is simple http, so there’s no peer-to-peer bandwidth concerns. I’m guessing that a direct download would have had the same result, provided I could launch it in something that supports resume.

Research and Waiting

While the download happens, it’s time to do some research. The beta login splash page has some interesting tabs on the right “Instructions for Beta Testers”, “New in this version” and “Playing the game”. But it doesn’t look like any of them expand. I tried 3 different browsers, so it’s just stub content it seems. Time to poke the rest of the site randomly then

They have a very good integrated character profile and item database on the site. Something like this from day one is interesting. Character profiles are on par with WoW’s Armory and the item browser is very good. The first thing I would add is a better search/filter option, but what they have is amazing for a pre-launch MMO. The URL’s are pretty, but the rendered html does not look very friendly to spidering and parsing for 3rd party use.

They have a blog system built into the site and surface it in a way that leads me to believe that people are actually posting. Player profiles also provide a place to post screenshots and shared calendars it looks like. Lots of community features. In fact, it looks like MyAlganon.com is nothing but their community site. Can’t find any details on the game itself here. Curious…

Following the Forums link takes me to Alganon.com, where my previous login is expired in order to gain access. That’s kind of a letdown – but I see actual game details here. And it looks like forum accounts are completely separate. Boo, they were doing so well for a while there. Well, it looks like I’m not looking at the forums then.

Interesting features:

• Studies – basically EVE style offline skill advancement it seems? Need to log in immediately on install so I can start training.
• Families – sort of game sponsored metaguilds that you join at birth. I like this. There are only five of them per race, and you get to pick one. They basically match you up with other players of similar Bartle type it seems.
• Controlled release – they are planning on intentionally gating the rate at which new paying customers will be accepted at launch? That’ll be… interesting I bet. Maybe they just meant for beta? Hmm.
• Consignment – auction house meets player-sponsored quests meets WTB purchase order posting. I like.
• Kudos – positive karma from other players to influence your LFGability. I like this. And it looks like they’re smart enough not to allow negative karma. Good.
• Dual Roles – looks like they have a good system for multispec that winds up with results similar to CO’s roles and builds, but maybe a bit more focused? Liking this too…
• Religions – looks like something similar to EQ2 religious affiliations meets WoW’s Scryers vs Aldor choice.
• Teleporters – it looks like there will be a good teleport hub network on the ground to save walking time Mounts are mentioned, but they don’t say anything about making them available from day one, so I’ll have to find that out later. Preorder accounts look like they get a mount, but it could be like Conan mounts that you have to carry around for 40 levels before you can use them…
• Mods – aaand it looks like they’re also going to allow for Lua scripted client mods, so that’ll be all kinds of fun.

This looks like an amazing foundation for a big time game. If they can actually pull it off, I’ll be impressed and pleasantly surprised.

The religion and consignment systems don’t look like they’re implemented yet, but they’re being publicly announced as planned features for future game growth. This growth looks like it is going to happen as part of scheduled major events – sort of like the opening of Ahn’Qiraj, meets the sort of events games like to launch to herald new expansions. The first of these is scheduled for Dec 1st (launch day). If my interest in the game remains, I might be checking back in for it.

Other things of note…

They have two main warring factions (Order and Chaos with fantasy names of Asharr and Kujix). The two factions cannot party or guild together “at this time”, and each only has one race. The races are humans for order and Talrok for chaos. Talrok appear to be largely human in shape with faces that remind me of nothing so much as Githyanki. Apparently high level members of both factions have different sorts of eye-glowy effects

Four classes fairly standard classes. Soldiers have a classic rage mechanic and stances similar to those of a WoW warrior. Rangers have poisons and auras and some healing ability. Healers have a pretty standard set of clerical/necromantic sort of abilities, including an ability to somehow become temporarily undead (dps form). Magus are what you’d expect but with apparently broader ability choices than simply which element of damage they want to inflict.

It appears that they are planning on a mild death penalty (no loss mechanisms), they want to avoid any sort of end-game raiding ruts, and want to make the game very soloable. Crafting skill progress seems to be gated on the RL timed study system, so one cannot simply buy max level smithing for an alt. No restriction on having characters of different factions on the same server.

90 minutes left in the download… it sped up.

Installation and Startup

Oh, good for them. When the download finished, the downloader IS smart enough to ask if I want to actually install the game.

The installation process asked a few questions that may scare people… but at least they were courteous enough to ask the questions in stead of simply patching DLL’s without permission, and asking to be added to the Windows firewall whitelist beforehand is something I wish more games would think about (so you don’t have that awkward first launch where the game hands and the error dialog pops under and everything crashes…). Otherwise, it was a bog standard installer, complete with ego folder and desktop icon and everything.

The installer to the patcher to the loading screen all went uneventfully. The game launches up by default in a very tiny window (800×600) with an illegibly small print NDA warning. Whuh? They lifted NDA when they announced the Open Beta start date, but forgot to remove it from the client. Hehe. Anyway.

Patch notes on the login page are in the same illegible font as the NDA. But at least I can get in.

First Session

Character creation interface is ripped directly from WoW. There is a tiny bit of icon rearrangement, but anyone who’s seen one will recognize the latter.

You know what, this tiny font thing irks me with a fierce irking. Closing and restarting… no option to change resolution from the patcher… but no NDA this time, and no tiny window once I get in either. It looks like 1280×1024 with legible text and everything. Ok, crisis averted, carry on. Nothing to see here.

Hmm, this really feels a LOT like WoW. The art is eerily similar but less refined. There are some strange animations when I pan the characters around and some clipping issues with the ground, but if I squint when I look at things… I’m seeing WoW so far.

Anyway, character of choice… I think that despite having rolled an archer last week, I have to go ranger. It sounds like WoW hunter (possibly minus pet) meets paladin with a side order of rogue. Yes please.

Ooh! I gets to pick my last name? Yay! Oh, wow, and my new character appeared up in their website Library immediately – before I even entered the game with him.

And upon entering the game, the WoW similarities only continue… Chat interface is similar, character portrait and minimal layout are similar, actionbar layout is similar… even some of the icons are. Hrm. However, it seems they’ve differed from WoW in one major way – no Yellow Bangs for quest givers. In stead, the icon is a big floaty book. Closed book for questgiver, open for turnin, locked for high level.

Characters have big level indicators above their names. These indicators are 2d and are pinned to the name label… and feel kind of strange in the 3d space. Hopefully I can get past that.

Upon entering the game, little tip icons are spamming me and a bright flashing warning that I’m wasting time by not studying. So… after a second or two of confusion, I take a look. The studies can be queued. This will be convenient, though initially, only three basic skills are visible.

Ok, time to kill some wolves I guess.

Yeah. ALL of the UI feels like cheap rips of WoW. I sincerely hope they resolve that before launch. Corpse loot cursor and dialogue are. The Spellbook is (though they call it the “Action book”). Talent tree (called “Abilities” but bound to the N key like in WoW) is similar but not exactly stolen, and it is flipped upside down. Quest journal is identical to the terrible stock WoW quest journal as its accompanying tracker. Friend list is similar, not stolen. Reputation and skills tabs off of character sheet are unmistakable… Even the general UI configuration menu is. Wow. Ok, well, let’s see if I can struggle through the uncanny valley of a bad WoW rip then. It was so promising on the web site too…

Anyway, back to killing wolves. Combat feels … slow and unpolished. Animations are a bit off. I have separate buttons for automelee and autoshoot, and the game switches between both automatically, but I was able to glitch it on my 4th kill and have both toggled on somehow (even though it looks like only one attack was happening).

There appears to be no minimum range for archery, but I switch right back to melee attacks after shooting. Ammo determines damage type and is not consumed on use.

The study allocation UI is a bit broken. Sometimes the last item in the list disappears. Likewise, the reputation window seems broken. I know I have rep with a faction, but the panel is empty.

It looks like I have one talent point to allocate from the very beginning, and got a second one when I dinged 2. It doesn’t look like many of the tier 1 abilities can actually be used at this point, however… Oh, and speaking of dinging 2, they dropped a treasure chest for me when I did. So I got a cool little knife now. Go go dual wield!

I turned in my wolf quest and walked into the first town upon noticing the questgiver dialogs down the road. First guy I see in town is a mount seller. Mooles (ponies). He’s selling the Lazy Moole for 1g, and it is theoretically usable at level 1. The next upgrade is 15g and usable at level 10. I have 15 copper, but then again, I’m level 2 and I’ve not vendored anything yet.

Second set of mobs to hunt after I’m done with wolves are some weird goblinoids camped around an authentically cool looking tentacle-entangled well thing. Apparently it is their fault? I’m not reading quest text at this point, I’m just murdering bigeared goblins… at an agonizingly slow pace. A critical hit with this pike I just found deals a whopping 6-7 damage to these guys (who have 80 health – a number I can only see by opening my character sheet while fighting). The listed damage for this spear is 5-11. My dual hatchet/dagger combo was laughably bad. I was hitting for 0-3 damage a hit. Yup, hit for 0. This is on top of misses and parries.

The camera control is a bit broken. It works half of the time, then occasionally it’ll snap back into place, ignoring my attempt to rotate so I can loot a corpse I’m standing on top of.

Turning in the quest to murder goblins was not enough to ding 3 yet. Let’s see if I can even injure these level 3 aligators. Thankfully I only have to get 3 drops from them… and it looks like they had the decency not to give them six legs (as per Warcraft crocolisks). Yup, I do full damage. Looks like the goblins had some sort of mean damage reduction.

Lost some time as I actually just played the game for a while…

Then I got into a discussion with old testers about whether or not the game was not simply “copying” WoW but intentionally plagiarizing. I was referred to the forums to find some dev post on the subject but could not find anything on the subject other than the normal uninformed lunatic ramblings of people who think Blizzard actually invented the fantasy MMO. The forum search was useless. It doesn’t allow searches containing words under 4 characters and locks you out for 20 seconds between search attempts – including those that returned zero results, etc…

Apparently, the whole “copying wow” discussion comes up every night… which leads me to believe that either they’ve got some sort of secret art pass that they’re waiting on, or they’re willfully ignoring it in the hopes that they can somehow make a buck before legal shuts them down.

This is actually my biggest concern right now. The game has so much potential… and they’re going to get sued off the face of the planet before they’re polished enough to actually play.

Ended the session on a sour note, with the one loyal beta tester almost begging me to take the discussion to the forums and see if I can’t get a dev response. Though I’m sure I’d be anything but the first such post, I just might do that. Will have to see if I still care in a few days.

Intermission

After reading a few interviews and some of today’s other press on the game, I’m convinced that Alganon’s leadership is just flat out mad. They’re drinking sweat from hallucinogenic frogs and have deluded themselves into going some place they really ought not to have wandered. So… I promised the nameless guy on the other side of the screen that I’d give the game more of a chance. But I almost don’t want to come out with yet another review panning the game next week. We’ll have to see. I think the odds of my getting a meaningful response on the forums is negligible, I doubt there’s anything I can actually do for them. It’s a shame, the whole game really does look good on paper…

I’ve been playing MMORPG’s avidly for over 13 years now. I like to think I am familiar with the history and the culture. So when I say something is a WoW rip-off, I’m fairly certain I mean it is a WoW rip-off as opposed to a clone of EQ or RO or DAoC or UO or FFXI any of the other countless influential games to hit the genre. And when I say rip-off, well, I don’t mean “inspired by”, I mean something the legal department should have kept from getting out the door. Somebody is living in a bubble if he ‘has yet to hear anyone who has played Alganon for any duration call it a “WoW ripoff”, and I have yet to feel “looked down upon” by anyone that has experienced firsthand the amount of effort, talent, and determination it takes to make an MMOG.’

Regardless of the blind drunk at the wheel, I AM going to continue trying to play. I have committed myself to at least 3 meaningful sessions with each of these games, and so far I’m only level 3 (because I got sidetracked at the gross plagiarism of it all and from there was stuck in conversations with others who made the same observation) so I don’t know if session one even counted Who knows, after another 8 or so hours of this, I might forget that I’m playing the English speaking world’s most blatant bad Warcraft clone.

Second Session

After a few days spent alternately between states of trepidation and morbid curiosity (and shooting zombies), I have geared myself up for another whack at the game. Let’s see if I can’t ding 10 or something today. No socialization, no crafting, no moping about the stolen UI, only solo quest grinding.

Ok. GOOD, there is a patch. And it addresses concerns I had, so we’ll see if things are at least a bit smoother. I’m also going to remember to take screenshots this time around… though upon entering the game, it doesn’t look like they have native screenshot functionality. I’ll have to use something 3rd party. I normally depend on XFire in cases like this, but that’s not much of an option with games in beta I also tried to record a few brief gameplay videos, but was unable to come up with anything I actually liked.

Heh, loading screen message read “Remember, there are no trolls in Alganon. If you want to troll the chat channels, you are in the wrong game.”

Grind, grind, quest, quest, ding, ding…

Hit level 5 after a bit more killing and encountered a few bugs. Friendly GM was friendly and spawned broken quest drops for myself and the 3 or 4 other people who encountered the issue at the same time. The people in game actually are quite friendly, all things considered.

Ok, I lied. I’ve talked to people and wound up doing some crafting along the way. There really is a lot of interest to the game, it is just so rough around the edges. Lowbie crafting seems to combine multiple disciplines into a single generic skill initially. So by cooking and making bandages, I am able to increase my ability to make gloves.

They rebooted the servers while I was in town cooking spiders. When it came back up again, much of the rubberbanding and client/server sync latency issues had resolved themselves. I was able to quickly mop up all remaining missions in the newbie zone and dinged 6 while turning them in.

Upon arriving in the second town, I got a good mix of quests and was confronted with a number of advanced tradeskill trainers. I think I am not going to bother with advanced tradeskills since I don’t have the time – and I doubt auctioning off gathered ore will really gain me anything (that is, if I can even find the auction house in time).

Talking to the local ranger trainer revealed interesting things of interest. The guy knew three abilities that I qualified for that the trainer in newbieland did not… this is a trifle annoying. I could have really used one of them (though the other two were very party specific). Regardless, the whole level 1-5 experience should not have taken me as long as it did. Less crashes and complaining and such would have gotten me out of there and on to my second town fairly quickly, I think.

Other Sessions

First real zone after newbiedom is… highly reminiscent of Westfall. Am I surprised? No. Am I disappointed? Not really. The theme’s a common enough one that I wouldn’t even suspect them of cribbing ideas were it not for their immediate track record. I’ve killed some insane farmers looking for the cause of their insanity, have gathered untainted sacks of grain, and have even killed some gnolls (which to be fair are also starting mobs once you get out of newbiedom in EQ2… but go very well with the Westfall theme).

I followed the trail of questgivers into a farmhouse where some survivors have huddled and got a popup from Steam telling me that L4D2 has activated… a few hours before I thought it would – but it looks like they’re operating on EST and I’m not complaining, so detour a bit while I kill zombies and build up the nerve to do Westfall again.

And another hour or so of playing later… and I am done.

/played says I’ve spent just about 5 hours actually logged into the game and I only got halfway to level 8. If they are looking to mimic WoW, that’s an inexcusably slow rate of advancement. As it is, the entire advancement process felt like I was swimming through molasses. The XP bar barely moved at all, even when I turned in a whole batch of quests.

The game really is “playable”, and it is occasionally even enjoyable… but it isn’t interesting, and it doesn’t feel like it has an original bone in its proverbial body. The Westfall similarities continued to dominate until I ran out of time. I even get to kill evil autonomous scarecrows and recover a piece of lost jewelery from a cupboard in an abandoned farmhouse.

The whole Ability/Talent system is broken. You get one point every level, starting at level 1. But you can’t use them on anything. Several of the first tier talents affect abilities I haven’t even seen at trainers yet and plenty of the more generic talents seem entirely broken. For instance, spending points to reduce the cast time of my Triage action (basic heal spell) by 0.5s does nothing, and spending points to increase my “parry” chance leaves parry unaffected but mysteriously increases my “block” chance (though I can’t use shields)…

Gameplay

I use the word “playable” in the most literal of senses. It is physically possible to play the game when nothing is crashing. Combat is agonizingly slow, walking is slow, advancement is slow. The rubberbanding and agonizingly slow projectiles (I can outrun my own arrows) added to mildly unresponsive ui and the awkward animations make it feel like playing a pre-release WoW proof of concept demo over dial-up with bad line noise.

The map tracks where you’ve been very effectively. While the web site brags up this feature talking about meters of accuracy as if they were selling GPS units, it isn’t far off. You can walk a few seconds and the big map will reflect the change.

Likewise, the quest tracker is actually pretty decent, once you can get past the fact that they don’t actually label which quest objective is being hilited. You can try to track multiple quests at once, but that only gave me a headache. But it seems you can track any mission, which ties in with their whole first party Library site nicely (which you can actually open in an in-game browser window… though since the game defaults to play in windowed mode in the first place, I’d likely just use an external browser).

Art and Music

So… I’ve mentioned the graphics. The UI is an unapologetically bad complete WoW rip, the 3d models are attempted in the style of WoW but fall short. Animations are jittery and amateurish. The breathing animation is terrible. There are bad clipping issues with regards to terrain.

The jump button. Oh my. The jump animation is just unacceptable in its badness. It’s like Princess Peach landing on a pool of gelatin.

Basically, they have no art budget left over after they built the overworld itself – which does look nice and is occasionally kind of unique. However, I would not be surprised if they literally unpacked WoW assets and broke them.

The Asharr and Kujix theme songs are available for listening on the web site. That’s always a good sign. Both themes are exactly what you’d expect. After one full listening each off of the site, I was neither impressed nor dissatisfied. They are appropriate but a bit long to be immediately catchy.

In game, the audio is fine. The music in newbieland is nice. I don’t know if it’s the same as the theme song from the web page, but it’s appropriate and possibly a bit more memorable.

Stability

I got booted from the server without warning while trying to decide where to spend my first skill point, and then the client quit completely. Upon attempting to log back in, it looks like the server crashed… all three servers crashed. This is certainly not a game that they could have launched in October, it isn’t open beta quality in my opinion. To be fair, the patch notes said that they were hotfixing servers and it did come back up quickly… and I don’t appear to have lost any data, which is nice.

The game client crashed the first time I tried to double-click on a quest-giver to turn in and they gave me a report dialog.

Looking back at that beta disclaimer I mentioned on the post-registration spash page, it is appropriate to share the thing now, I think:

NOTICE: You are participating in the first BETA phase of Alganon. The game WILL crash. You WILL encounter issues. Your valuable efforts in helping us test Alganon will diminish these problems over time.
Please be patient as we update the game on a regular basis. To log a bug with the game, type /bug and enter the details. Remember, both the Client and Server are being enhanced and rebuilt on a daily basis. You can expect a Client Patch at least once a week.

At least they admit it.

Server also came down hard once in the middle of a normal reboot countdown… I’m unimpressed with the stability of the client or server, but I’ve seen worse. They get a C for stability of a beta quality client. This level of crashitude would be unacceptable fail if they were live and charging people.

Final Grade

Alganon is a low budget poorly executed clone of World of Warcraft. While it has its moments, it is rough around more than just the edges. While it looks good on paper, the end result is laughably bad. I give it a 2 out of 10, with mercy points for having managed to entertain me briefly.

Afterthoughts

I don’t really have any thoughts that I’ve not expressed a few times already over the course of this week. The game looks good on paper, but so did Auto Assault and Matrix Online. It has a lot of fans, though I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why they don’t all just go play on some bootleg WoW shard in stead.

If they can clean up the interface, and fix all of the hurdles to playability, and rebalance abilities/mobs/economy, and retune the advancement rate, and write some really original content, and recover from all of the bad press they’ve bought for themselves… I think I would be happy to give them another chance.

What’s Next?

I’m still deciding. I’ve got two or three games on the list and will update the post here when I make up my mind.

Update: Next week is Ether Saga. Reasoning behind the drawn-out decision will come with the report

A few minutes ago, I just closed out the first milestone I’d ever created with the system (just fixing some sqlite-handling code as you may guess from the screenshot) and was rewarded with this little temporal paradox:

Heh… what an auspicious first post of the year…

Recently, I’ve been playing a good bit of Dream of Mirror Online (DOMO – not to be confused with Domo-kun), and I think it’s safe to say that I’m hooked for now.

Earlier this month, Massively posted an article on five games they thought were better than WoW in one category or another. (It’s not really that hard to beat WoW in one thing, their secret sauce is in the combination…). I agreed with the first four games on the list, but had never even heard of the fifth game – DOMO, which they claimed had a way better casual experience. Scouring their site, it turns out they’ve shown the game nothing but love, and a lot of it. So I suffered through the enormous download and slightly creepy registration process (they provided me with a gmail link to check my registration email when I was done…).

DOMO is what I’ve always referred to as a Korean style MMORPG (except that in this case it is actually by a Taiwanese game studio, for what it’s worth). Normally, the genre is typified by soul crushingly repetitive grinding of mobs for the sole reason of becoming capable of grinding a different colour of mob. There is no plot, there is very little skill or thought involved. You buy health potions in batches of 1000 and drink 50 of them every kill – I’ve actually had other players recommend I wedge a penny in my keyboard to hold down the potion spam button…

These games can be fun… for a few hours, sometimes even days. But in all of my sampling of the genre (why I keep coming back, I’ll never know), I’ve only really encountered 3 games I liked enough to spend more than a week on. DOMO makes four.

I like them because they appear to have learned from the mistakes of others, they actually address most of my standard gripes about the genre. For starters, they don’t install a rootkit on your system and you can auto-reject duel requests…

For a free-to-play game (entirely optional micropayments), they offer one thing I’d never really really seen before. Content. For any given level of character in the stereotypical KMMO, there is precisely one optimal grinding spot that all players compete over. When you ding, you progress to the next spot and compete with those players. Maybe the mobs you compete for change models.

For a level 10-11 character in DOMO, I can think of four different places to hunt/quest. They actually have quests. And they’re not all just the “kill 300 foozles and I will give you money” type quests (though there are admittedly a lot of those). So far, I have done quests that involved:

• Talking to all of the important NPC’s in town so I know my way around.
• Bribing and bamboozling members of the thieves’ guild in order to gain admission.
• Manufacturing a sturdy rope so I could gain access to a new dungeon.
• Slaying zombies to collect information and try to figure out why they’re rising.
• Walking across a few maps while blind.

At around level 15, characters can learn to fly by surfing on their sword (the game is wuxia themed, after all). The quest to gain this ability involves defeating the Flying Frog King with a large party and getting some magical frog powder from him… (Which always reminds me of kind of the opposite of Discworld’s dried frog pills, which were actually used to keep the Bursar from hallucinating that he could fly).

DOMO has a sense of humor. The art is cell shaded and cartoony (which I personally appreciate). The monsters are just a bit goofy. While the translation isn’t 100% (when is it ever?), it’s worth paying attention to quest dialog. During the introductory quests, you pose for pictures with one of the game universe’s gods, etc… (and a little frog pops up to tell you how to take screenshots).

DOMO also has a refreshingly interesting pick-and-choose sort of class system. It’s not really that innovative, other games have done it before… but I don’t think any other multi-player game has done it as well. It reminds me of a cross between FFXI and FFT. Every character can advance levels separately in different classes (I am currently a lvl 17 thief, 15 fencer, 12 musician, and 11 doctor between the two characters I’ve been playing). You can then equip abilities that you learned on other classes – even if they do perform at slightly lowered efficiency. At higher levels, you can learn to equip gear from other classes as well – so you could play a wizard wearing mercenary heavy armour if desired.

Unlike FFXI, where you start every class at level 1… DOMO has a “Commoner” class that everyone starts with. You level commoner to 10 and then start questing to learn other classes. Every other job in the game starts at level 10. So far, I’ve found almost every class to be completely viable for solo play at 10 (Wizard is difficult because their spells cost components that are very expensive at low level).

One of the most interesting things about DOMO’s class system is that they’ve made completely viable support roles available – no potion spamming here. And sure, while anybody can equip first aid as a secondary ability… many of a class’s best abilities require you to equip that class’s equipment as well. The doctor and musician classes are in high demand. If you’re going to go fight anthropomorphic casks of wine in the basement, who wouldn’t want to bring along a doctor who’s going to suck the toxic booze out of your system with a 3 foot long syringe?

The game’s crafting system starts off as pretty typical of the genre. You are encouraged to AFK while collecting resources by using consumable gathering tools in designated areas. Items gathered in this way are combined with normal mob drops to both create and upgrade equipment. Where DOMO improves on the old system is by actually making crafted equipment preferable to vendor equipment. Recipes must be gathered in a variety of ways, and the ability to actually use the recipes is purchased with your Commoner class’s skill points.

The game has a cash shop, but very few of the items for sale there really affect gameplay. In fact, every one of them is entirely optional. Most are cosmetic in nature or offer temporary buffs of one sort or another. The only things from the item shop that really matter are pet tokens – can’t get summons without either buying them from the cash shop or by buying them from another player in game. But there seems to be no shortage of players willing to sell you a starter pet for 10-20k game currency.

Of course, nobody’s perfect. The two places where DOMO falls down in my eyes are in the documentation and in the archaic user interface.

The official US web page is almost devoid of useful information. You’re much better off looking for an answer in the forums or one of several 3rd-party wikis. Because the translation isn’t perfect, skill/quest descriptions may be misleading or confusing.

The UI suffers from similar problems. The game launcher hangs around after you’ve launched the game (but you can close it manually). All music is turned off by default. In order to toggle on the ability to see what other users are wearing you actually deselect the “Show equipment” option. And I don’t even know what “Turn off player’” even means

NPC dialog takes over all other mouse input, so if you start a conversation with a quest giver and his chat bubbles start popping up behind your inventory window… well, tough. You’ll just have to click through and hope you didn’t care what he said, because you can’t close the window (clicks anywhere are interpreted as instructions to progress the dialog). HUD notification text (such as from earning xp for a quest turnin or exchanging items with an NPC, etc…) take a LONG time to fade away, and since they often pop up during NPC interaction, they frequently obscure these chat bubbles as well.

They give players the option of WASD for movement (click-to-move is still the default), but don’t give keyboard commands for target selection. So you still have to click on your enemies to start attacking them.

Most of the game’s keybindings are just bizarre and can’t be changed. Ctrl-X brings up your skill list, Ctrl-D for inventory, Ctrl-C for quest journal, etc…

Oh, and in order to cast a targeted spell on yourself, you have to actually click on your avatar (or on your character portrait in the UI). There’s no way to automatically target self when casting heals while soloing, etc…

But I can live with all of that. Xfire seems to think that I’ve played a total of 26 hours since I installed the game 3 weeks ago (several of those hours were spent afking overnight while working in the glass mines).

Overall, I give the game an 8 out of 10. The UI gets a 3 and the fun factor gets a 9 – it is probably the best casual MMORPG I’ve seen since Puzzle Pirates. While certainly not a game for everyone, it is absolutely worth the cost if you’re looking for something casual and silly with a good degree of replayability.

Thank you, DOMO. Thank you for giving me something to do in stead of my Sunwell dailies while waiting for WoW’s next expansion. Thank you for renewing my faith in the free-to-play MMORPG industry.

p.s. Please forgive me my awful puns…

Today at the TechCrunch20 TechCrunch40 conference, we finally announced our project, Metaplace. I won’t bore people with repetitive descriptions of what we’re doing – the official site has already explained things, so go read over there

I wasn’t actually looking for a new job. I’ve got a 3-month-old daughter and a mortgage only slightly older than that But, I also stumbled across an opportunity that was entirely too good to ignore.

No, I can’t pronounce it either. Nobody can.

See… I’ve always wanted to work in the video game industry (some times more than others), and I’ve been a big fan of Raph Koster’s work for a while now. I’ve read his book and agree with most of the things he says in it.

I’d actually read the news on the day Raph and John announced the company and was intrigued. I looked at their job postings and didn’t see anything that fit me very well, so I passed it up.

Then, a little while ago, a new list of job postings went out and I actually matched two of the positions… after a bit of bullying from friends, and a lot of agonizing over the potential heartache, I figured I may as well apply for both of them. I interviewed with the team shortly thereafter, got along great with people, liked the environment, and am absolutely in love with the project. It’s gonna be awesome.

I’m not doing this for any sort of perceived financial gain that might come from it. I have no illusions that I’m getting any measurable pay raise out of this. I’m doing it because it’s about as close as I can realistically get to my dream job. I’m doing it because I believe in the project’s goals. I’m doing it because I’m a great big dork who’s never really taken a chance like this before. I’m doing it because I don’t think I could ever forgive myself for not doing it.

Our house is 90% packed. We’ve done some minor repairs and painting in order to make the place more attractive to renters. We have a short lease on a medium-sized apartment in Escondido. If the place works out, great. If not, we’re not tied down to it.

We pick up the U-haul next Tuesday morning. If all goes well, we arrive in California early the following day.

I start work on the 30th.

Prediction: The next expansion will focus on expanding Azeroth

I don’t think the next expansion will be the Emerald Dream – that’s expansion the 3rd. This time around, we’re going to come back to Azeroth and fill in the holes in the map. And there are numerous holes in the map of Azeroth right now.

There are at least 3 more continents we’ve not yet gotten access to: Northrend, Undermine, and Pandaria. There is also lore surrounding the Maelstrom and the associated bits of sunken Kalimdor.

Even on our existing continents, we’re missing several areas. A few of my favorites:

• Grim Batol is a potential overland zone with at least one high level instance east of Loch Modan and the Wetlands.
• Mount Hyjal is where the final battle of WC3 took place. It’s been a big closed off zone since the beginning of the game. In the last patch, they released two new flight paths essentially adjacent to the mountain border with Hyjal.
• Uldum is a big instance gate in southern Tanaris that taunted me every time i drove past it. Everyone’s expecting this one, just don’t know when it’ll happen.
• Dalaran is another obvious place for expansion. It’s the big purple bubble that all Undead players bump into on their way to Taren Mill for the first time.
• Gilneas is another big gate next to Silverpine. There were some pretty funny rumors going around before the Draenei and Blood Elves were announced that the zone was entirely peopled by werewolves…

Most of the smart money is on Northrend as the primary focus of the next expansion, and I tend to agree. There have been hints in the past that Arthas might be a level 80 raid boss. People have been begging for it for a while now – we’ve wanted this more than we wanted Outland

It also does nice things for bringing people back to Azeroth to do more than just shop or powerlevel alts.

How do we get to Northrend? I suspect that there will need to be boats installed. Viable locations for these ships might be eastern Azshara, Undermine, and northern Tristfal.

I actually really like the idea of establishing a settlement on one of the tips of Azshara, but it would be weird for a new city to magically appear out there overnight. Tristfal has the same problem, but to a much lesser degree – it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to imagine the Forsaken setting up a naval base out there to lead the charge in taking the war back to Scourge territory.

Undermine, and the island it lives in (Kezan), are the most logical choice… unless they open up Gilneas.

Gilneas is fun. Since there’s no communication with the place, it’s entirely possible that everyone inside’s been killed and turned into zombies or what-have-you… or that it’ll finally be willing to join with humanity in the fight against the Scourge. Maybe the Scourge broke through the wall and they came crawling to Southshore for help? This would give the Alliance a potential starting point to get out there. But I doubt it’ll happen. If I had to bet on the fate of Gilneas, though, I say they’re the new Southern Plaguelands by now – especially since the Alliance already have a much more probable city up that way in Dalaran.

Undermine really is the most logical choice. Probably. It’s a sizable island dedicated to commerce. The goblins certainly would see a profit in allowing both Horde and Alliance navies to set up shipyards on their northern shores – so long as they behave themselves and don’t kill each other in goblin territory (just like any other goblin controlled city).

I’d like to see Undermine become the new Shattrath. It makes the most sense to connect it to Steamwheedle Port (esp since no other boats use the dock atm), but that’s a pretty inconvenient location for such an important travel route. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to also connect it to Ratchet or Booty Bay somehow. Possibly tie it into the zeppelin network and give the Alliance a boat out of Southsore?

By connecting Undermine to lvl 20-40 zones, it would be quite appropriate to make the Isle of Kezan actually contain a good bit of content suitable to that level range. Make it into several (4-5) areas that provide a viable alternative to Stranglethorn and Desolace. The game is currently weakest in the lvl 30-50 content range right now, this is a good solution. With no new races, there’s no need to introduce new pairs of newbie zones – that effort should be bumped up to mid-level content

So, if we allow Undermine to become a large travel hub and allow it to connect players to Northrend, what do they have to do up there? High level content. Mid level content. Max level content. Several new instances. Northrend is big – really big. The map shows 11 zones plus plenty of spots for instances. Perhaps it could be made suitable for levels 50 and above – or even levels 45 and above. The continent is big enough that they could easily add another 45-55 zone in addition to zones all the way up to level 80.

But… we need a lot more lvl 70+ content in the next expansion, right? Well… TBC introduced a total of 11 new overworld zones in addition to instances. If they considered 7 zones sufficient new high level content for this expansion, I don’t see why the next expansion should be any different. Add an extra chunk or two of lvl 70+ content to Outland, leave the rest in Northrend, and we’ve still got room to resolve the dearth of mid-level content.

Suggested overworld zone level breakdown:

• Kezan – 30-40, 35-45 x2, 40-50
• Northrend – 45-55, 55-60, 60-65, 65-70, 70-75 x3, 73-78 x2, 75-80 x2
• Outland – 70-75, 75-80

This is a total of 17 zones – 6 more than TBC introduced. As a reasonable trade-off, I’d like to think that not every zone needs unique world PvP objectives and multiple instances in the initial launch. They can do with these what they did with Ghostlands and Zul’Aman – that is, the instance needn’t be launched at the same time as the zone containing it. There is plenty of other precedence for this.

I think it is entirely reasonable to focus new instanced content on lvl 70+, so perhaps none of the lvl <70 zones get new instances?

Either way... I predict that the world will be getting a lot larger and that most of the growth will be on Azeroth this time. And I hope I hope I hope they do something about the lack of good mid-level overland zones in the game. They needn't be huge zones, just interesting changes of pace for people hoping to get their 6th alt over lvl 50 w/o repeating the same blasted quests over and over again.

Prediction: Access to Outland will be improved

Since low level players can already get to Shattrath with a little help from a friendly mage, the level 58 restriction on going through the Dark Portal feels really arbitrary. Especially since it’s possible to enter the Ramparts at level 55, and the level requirement for Master crafting professions is only 50 but they must be trained in Outland. I’d like to see the gate opened to all players capable of driving across the Blasted Lands in the first place. That’s good enough of a restriction already.

Perhaps they’ll eventually add some easier transport methods direct to the Dark Portal? Maybe a portal from Dalaran? Maybe one each from Stormwind and Orgrimmar? Perhaps a faction-neutral zeppelin path from Booty Bay?

Prediction: Woodworking will finally be made available to players

They released Jewelcrafting in TBC with … interesting results. It was an expansion-only profession that was still able to benefit players who were too cheap/uninterested to grab the expansion. It is terribly useful to lvl 65+ characters, just like Enchantments and Alchemy have always been important to high end players.

However, launching a new profession also made for an awful glut of cheap goods on the market. I am a lvl 367/375 jewelcrafter now, and I have yet to break even. I doubt I ever will. I spent hundreds and hundreds of gold to get from 250 to 300. The economy is terribly wrecked as a result of the new demand for jewels, but shrug. It’s not like the incredible inflation from Outland didn’t have a huge effect on prices either

One of the most requested features from players has always been that they let us make our own bows and arrows. I think a profession that makes bows, arrows, staves, and shields would be great. This would fill the gap left by other crafting professions and make it possible to finally craft every type of equipment in the game.

The big problem with releasing woodworking is with the gathering aspect of things… do you add trees to herbalism? Do you make lumber drop off of certain common NPC varieties like cloth does? Do you make trees harvestable by anyone? Do you add a woodcutter/lumberjack gathering profession? Do you make woodworking a combination gathering/crafting profession? None of these options by itself is very ideal.

Enchanting and Jewelcrafting are already combination gathering/crafting professions, with the exception that improvement in the gathering aspect of the profession is only possible by improving the crafting aspect. I think this is a good starting point for Woodworkers.

Allow Woodworkers to break apart bows and staves in order to get special materials – but not their own work (you can’t DE something you just enchanted and expect to get the shards back). Allow them to harvest wood from certain npc corpse types just like miners and herbalists can now. Make plant type mobs likely to drop wood in addition to flowers. Make the numerous lumber mills around the game actually spawn piles of lumber that any player can loot – similar to treasure chests.

I think adding some basic types of lumber (reusing the enchanting wand and campfire materials) to common vendors would not hurt at all – every other crafting profession has to buy some of their reagents already, why not these too?

And if Blizzard does all of that… I think it might work. I don’t like the idea of generically choppable tree nodes like mines and flowers. There’s something about the size of things that just doesn’t quite work for me. Perhaps there could be a class of largish flowers that herbalists can gather if they carry a tool with them. Or, perhaps they could just go ahead and add small trees to the world map that can be cut down. Shrug.

Prediction: The crafting skill cap will be raised to 450, others skills will only increase to 400

This isn’t much of a logical jump here. They need a new tier to make equipment for lvl 80’s. They’ve actually caught themselves in a pretty vicious cycle by bumping character levels out of sync with the crafting levels. When the game launched, both combat and crafting skill caps were 300. When TBC launched, though, they only added 50 levels to combat skills while crafting caps went up by another 75.

If they make the next tier of crafting skill also have a cap of 450, they’ll have gotten 50 ranks out of sync unless they surprise everyone and bump the level cap in the game to 90 My money’s on increasing the imbalance between the skill numbers.

As far as other skills go… I don’t know. Adding another tier or two of riding skill works well, but what would they add at that point? Aquatic mounts? Mounts that work in certain underground Nerubian zones? I guess the current disparity between crafting and normal skills AND riding skills shows that they don’t much care about the actual balance between the numbers. But I wish they would – it would make things pretty again

Prediction: Secondary skills will get some love

First aid can do precisely two things right now. It can make bandaids and it can make antivenom potions. Mostly, it just makes bandaids since the antivenom is quite inconvenient. I’d like to see first aid have an easier time of curing poisons and have options for treating disease based debuffs – make healing poison easier and make healing disease about as difficult as healing poison is now. They also need to add some additional tiers to the poisons. Right now, the only way to make lvl 60 antivenom is through an Argent Dawn recipe. There is no lvl 70 antivenom – and besides, the ingredients they’d probably use for them are currently being monopolized by people who want to defect over to Scryers

I’d also really like it if they could give inoculations that act as long-term disease/poison prevention buffs. It would give priests a reason to train first aid. But a 30 minute buff with say 5 charges of poison curing? Good stuff. Rogues would probably throw a fit, but shrug, I play a hunter. I dislike rogues

At present, cooks can only manufacture food. The skill can’t make drinks – even if a handful of cooking recipes do give +mp5 from their well fed buffs. I think allowing players to manufacture their own drinks would be fun and would entice more people to drop time into the skill. Right now, if people rely on secondary skills for out-of-combat healing, they’re 99% likely to be using bandages anyway…

Besides, it’s not like adding drinks to the skill will in any way unbalance things. Mage water’s still free, ne?

Currently, the worst secondary skill is fishing. It requires an insane time commitment to level and is actually quite dangerous at times. This makes it terribly unattractive to anyone but hunters and cooks. And since there are very few people who train cooking in any meaningful way… fishing gets even less attention. I like fishing, but… I’ve not really engaged in any fishing since hitting 300 a while back.

I want to see net fishing. I want to see more fish that come out of the water and attack you. I want to see fishing with dynamite and shotguns and traps. Fishing could easily be made into an interesting mini-game. All crafting could. EQ2 did a great job with that, and WoW could really use a new type of gameplay right about now.

In the games we’ve watched, discussed, and played over the last week or so, several interesting observations have been made:

• Infantry are way overpowered.
• The game is all about money, but then again, lots of games are.
• Light artillery is useless.
• The RNG hates me.
• Alliances win.
• It’s dangerous to be identified as the big threat.

infantry == free money

When we say infantry are overpowered… there really is no easy way to describe just how overpowered they really are. Light infantry cost $75 and heavy infantry cost $100. The difference is that light infantry move 2x as fast as heavy and heavy infantry hit vehicles 2x as hard as light (the game says that heavy have 4x the offensive power vs vehicles as light do… but that doesn’t seem to translate to 4x the damage potential). Infantry can capture bases. Infantry can cross mountains. Infantry get substantial offensive and defensive bonuses for being in heavy terrain. They suffer penalties in swamps, but then again, so do vehicles.

Compare this with your basic light tank. The tank costs $300 to produce, moves like light infantry, cannot cross mountains, suffers offensive and defensive penalties for being in heavy terrain, and will come out hurting very badly if it tries to solo a heavy infantry unit. Two heavy infantry who get the drop on a tank are assured a win. And it’s entirely possible that both units will survive – allowing them to heal up and fight something else.

This is where the game comes down to money. If $200 worth of infantry can beat $300 worth of vehicles, then the player with the infantry has tipped the money scale dramatically in his favor. To further illustrate the scenareo (which is not 100% realistic, but still illustrates my point), I present the following detailed example. Much of this example is just an extension of ideas Adam expressed a few days ago, so I take very little credit here

Player A and player B are playing a game on a very small map consisting entirely of basic grassland, no fancy terrain bonuses here. Both players control two bases and the battle front is incredibly close. Each base produces $100 per turn. Let’s begin the scenareo with $300 per player and no units.

Turn 1: Player A moves first and creates two heavy infantry, bringing his money down to $100. Player B creates a tank for $300, wiping his money out.

Turn 2: Player A moves his two heavy infantry forward and creates two more. He is spending exactly as much money as he is earning, so his balance remains at $100. Player B had $0 coming into this round, earns $200 for his bases, and decides to keep that money in favor of producing a tank next turn.

Turn 3: Player A attacks the tank with his two foremost infantry and almost kill it. He then moves his second pair forward and creates a third pair of heavy infantry. Player B gets his second tank, dropping his balance down to $100. He attacks one of the infantry that attacked his first tank and kills it, but also takes some damage in the process.

Turn 4: Player A moves his injured infantryman back and attacks the injured tank with one of his fresh units. The tank dies, barely scratching the full strength infantry unit. He moves his 5 other infantry forward and creates two more. Player B attacks the unit that just killed his first tank and injures it fairly badly, dropping it down to 4/10 health, but not after taking 3 damage himself. He creates another tank and is back to nothing in the bank.

Let’s take a moment to count score. Money in the bank doesn’t count, but it doesn’t really matter anyway, since both players have similar amounts of money on hand and coming in. However, compare the monetary value of their units on the board.

Player A has 7 full strength heavy infantry worth $700. He also has one more unit at 40% health for a total value of $740. Player B has one full strength tank on the board worth $300 and one unit at 70% health for a total functional value of $510.

Turn 5: Player A swarms the injured tank with 3 of his uninjured units and kills it. He then moves his 4 remaining uninjured units forward, they are on B’s doorstep by now. His one previously injured unit rests for +1/10 health. He creates two more heavy infantry, bringing his population up to 6 uninjured, 4 moderately injured infantry.

Player B has one solitary tank now. He cannot afford another one. He cannot reach any of player A’s injured units to attack them, his only choice is to attack one of the uninjured units, which he does, injuring it heavily, but not enough to destroy it, and not without taking damage himself.

Turn 6: Player A stomps the injured tank, clearing the board of player B’s units. He moves one of his remaining uninjured infantry ont o each of player B’s bases and begins capturing. All of his injured units rest for +1/10 health. He creates two more units, just to be cheeky about the whole situation. Player B earns $200 more, bringing his money in the bank up to $400, but he can’t do anything with it since both of his bases are occupied.

Turn 7: Player A creates two more units, finishes capturing player B’s bases, and wins the game.

The final tally shows player A having not even broken a sweat. He has 14 units on the board and $100 in the bank, compared to player B’s zero units on the board and his useless $400 in the bank.

So… while it was a slightly unfair example, the point stands. Hordes of infantry are worth way more than their equivalent weight in tanks. Put them in rough terrain and the difference becomes even more marked, the infantry may move slightly slower through rough terrain, but they become significantly tougher. Of course, infantry through rough terrain are usually faster than vehicles through rough terrain anyway… What then, is the counter to heavy infantry? An equal or greater quantity of light infantry. They cost 25% less, move faster and hit heavies just as hard as the heavies hit them back. No contest.

Resting is free money. Remember, the only money that really matters is money that’s already been spent to produce units. If you can get more use out of your units…

There are only two other unit types in the game worth discussing.

Raiders (recon bikes) are the fastest units in the game, they cost $200, and they hit infantry as hard as light tanks. They are great at closing gaps, blocking bases, and picking off solitary infantry. A small group of raiders can hit and run a poorly organized group of infantry into oblivion w/o taking any permanent casualties.

artillery

And then there’s artillery. In basic games, there are only two varieties of artillery. Light and heavy. Light artillery cost $400, move rapidly, and have an attack range of 2-3 hexes. Heavy artillery cost $600, move slowly, have a range of 3-4 hexes, and hit much harder. They have very little defense, so once a normal unit gets next to it, the artillery unit is pretty much dead. “Pro” games have a few more types of vehicles, including more two more varieties of artillery, both of which are quite nifty.

A wall of cheap infantry takes time to carve through, especially if they’re rotating their wounded out to heal. Stick a few heavy artillery pieces behind them and they’re unstoppable.

Why did I say that light artillery is ~useless? Well, for one, it only has an offensive rating of 4|4 (vs infantry|vehicles). Heavy infantry have an offensive rating of 3|4 and you can field 4 of them for the price of one light artillery, or you could get yourself a pair of 5|2 raiders for the same money. The other problem with light artillery is that they have a short range and cannot move and attack on the same turn. Thus they must get very close to the enemy to attack anything at all. That, and despite their speed, they’re pretty much incapable of attacking heavy artillery w/o getting blown to pieces along the way.

Heavy artillery have 5|5 offense, 2x the range, and 1 more armour than light artillery for only 50% more money. Thus, for $1200 you could either field three light artillery and have a hard time positioning them in such a way that all 3 can attack on the same turn w/o being exposed to attack themselves… or you could field a pair of heavies and slowly creep across the map flattening all who oppose.

What’s the solution to heavy artillery? Raiders. Large quantities of infantry. Anything that can close into short range and kill w/o being killed first.

How do you keep your artillery from being killed? Keep a thick wall of cheaper units in front of them. Remember, you can buy 8 light infantry for the cost of one heavy artillery. Nothing in the game has AoE attacks… so 8 cheap units take a very long time to carve through… especially if you’re able to cycle the injured ones back to rest.

unbalanced dice

One gripe I have about Weewar is that the random factor really is a bit too random for my taste. I like my tactical games to depend more on tactics than luck. Right now… it is too easy to have a run of bad luck and get knocked out of the game for a few bad rolls.

In Advance Wars, the attacking unit always gained an advantage. Healthier units always did more damage than injured units. Not so with Weewar. It is not unusual for a pair of fully healed infantry to attack a raider and both wind up taking the same amount of damage.

Infantryman 1 attacks the raider, does 3 damage, takes 4 damage.

Infantryman 2 attacks the raider – which should now be operating at only 70% power, does 2 damage, takes 5 damage.

To compound the situation, the game’s official documentation says that multiple units attacking the same target from multiple angles get bonuses.

With small numbers like this, slight variations due to a fickle RNG are still large enough to make any such advantage very hard to notice. It is there. It must be. I’ve convinced myself that it is. But the numbers only occasionally support this.

If you could see the dice, maybe? At least then you could brag about the crits when they happen and blame losing an attack on obviously poor rolls.

I don’t mind randomness… but the game doesn’t even keep a text log of attacks and their results (much less the numbers involved), and I think that makes the occasional spot of ill fortune seem even more pointless and arbitrary than it might otherwise. It’s not unheard of to attack a unit that you should by all rights be able to kill with minimal injury and wind up losing your attacking unit in the process – despite supposed terrain modifiers in your favor, etc…

Shrug. For now, the wide range of possibilities from the RNG are just one more reason that infantry are superior. You don’t feel so bad when the game throws your infantry away as you do when you lose a heavy tank to bad dice

strength in numbers, sometimes

Another thing we’ve noticed about the game is that teamwork really makes a difference. Not only does an alliance mean you don’t waste your time killing each other’s units… it typically means ~2x the units pointed at your enemies.

I recently lost a game rather soundly because I was winning. Yup. Lost because I was winning.

See, it was a four-man match on a square board. Each player started in one quadrant of the board. I started in the NW and made a tentative peace with the player to the NE while I built up units along my southern border. The SW player provoked both myself and his other neighbor, the player to the SE. Meanwhile, NE and SE had some minor tussles but nothing too major.

SW made a mistake and I sort of crushed him up against SE and took most of his bases. This left me in control of something like 10 or 12 bases while NE and SE only had 6 or 7 each. This worried them, so they stopped their minor border conflict and charged west at me. Every turn for 4 turns in a row, my line was pushed back by one hex. I didn’t have time to repair any units, the push was too strong.

When I finally surrendered, I had captured SW’s remaining bases but had lost several of my other bases along the border. Between the two of them, they held 15 bases compared to my 11 – a 36% advantage in production capacity. I had started the conflict slightly depleted because of my successful campaign against SW (who had actually held the biggest army before I overtook him), and their collectively superior income were sufficient to give them an overwhelming majority of numbers.

It doesn’t pay to be too big. One-on-one, I could have mopped up either one of them. Unfortunately, because I had such an enormous lead on either one of them individually, they realized the obvious and allied against me. Like lobsters in a tank who can’t stand to let another one climb out…

I think I could have had a chance at the game if I hadn’t taken all of SW’s bases. In stead, I was greedy and took off a bigger bite than I could keep down.

ideas

So, aside from the issues discussed already (infantry need a good nerf batting and the RNG is too random), there’s only really one problem with the game. It’s written in clingy, needy, zero self-esteem sort of AJAX. It’s the kind of code that feels the irrational compulsion to phone home to the server every time you click a unit to select it. I mean… if you’re going to wait for the server to do all of the thinking, why bother with any sort of client-side logic at all? The game could be so much faster, and the server could handle so many more players if they moved most of the incessant click management logic to the client where it belongs and only sent final moves to the server for validation.

And, aside from that little gripe… I’ve a few other things I’d like to see in the game.

Namely, I want to see a greater variety of units. The game is already a paper-rock-scissors contraption, let’s make units even more specialized, eh wot?

A few new types of infantry, perhaps?

• demolitions squad – normal movement, 1.5x cost of heavy (bazooka) infantry, 1 defense, 0|6 offense (useless against infantry – death to tanks), unable to capture bases, ability to “sabotage” enemy bases. Sabotage destroys the demo squad and reverts the enemy base to neutral – instantly, in stead of having to wait 2 turns for a capture by a normal infantry unit.
• flamethrower squad – slow movement, 3x cost of heavy infantry, 2 defense, 4|2 offense, deal splash (reduced, indirect) damage to the two hexes behind and to either side of their primary target. Splash damage always happens and attacks any units in the area, regardless of team affiliation.
• mortar squad – slow movement, 2.5x cost of heavy infantry, 1 defense, 3|5 offense, attack range of 1-2. Attacking adjacent units still counts as indirect fire. Only artillery that can cross mountains. Do not get offensive bonuses or penalties for terrain.
• recon team – fast movement, 1x cost of heavy infantry, 2 defense, 2|1 offense. Reduced movement penalty for moving across otherwise slow terrain.
• engineering team – normal movement, 3x cost of heavy infantry, 2 defense, 1|1 offense. Ability to build bunkers that act as immobile 3|3 retaliatory units until destroyed. Building a bunker costs the team 6 health. Bunkers have 2 defense and cannot be repaired once damaged.
• skirmishers – normal movement, 1x cost of heavy infantry, 3 defense, 2|2 offense. Can use any remaining movement after attacking.

Of course these numbers aren’t really balanced. At least, they’re not balanced any more than the current ones are

If we allow flamethrower infantry, we probably want flame tanks as well. Perhaps cluster bomb artillery that randomly hit 2 or 3 hexes adjacent to their target? Maybe some type of AoE that is good vs vehicles but not against infantry? Maybe give a unit the ability to deal damage that tunnels on to the unit behind it, but only on a kill? Rail gun?

How about special map restriction options or victory conditions? No artillery allowed, no infantry allowed, no recon bikes allowed? Game ends after 10 turns, with whoever controls the most of the map wins? First player to cap 7 bases wins? Etc…

Fog of war? Probably not. It could work, it does in Advance Wars… but I don’t see it working very well in this sort of environment. It’s too easy for players to share intel, it drags the game out too long if they don’t, etc…

I like the idea of adding shallow water to the game that only infantry are capable of crossing. It would slow them down just as much as mountains would and it gives an offensive and defensive penalty worse than swampland.

If we’re allowing infantry to move in water, how about naval units? That would require a whole new set of maps, but no harm there. Air units? Those would be nice too.

Other terrain types? Jungle is thicker than forest and is the ultimate entrenched position for infantry. Artillery cannot target units in the jungle. Roads give vehicles a bonus to movement but make you terribly vulnerable to attack. Bridges function exactly like roads except they make you even more of a sitting duck.

Could possibly allow engineering units to terraform the map, changing forest to plains to roads and building bridges across rivers, etc…

Mobile factories? Very slow, non-combative units that can only move along roads and over grass. Able to build units wherever they are for 50% extra cost. Can’t drive and build on the same turn. Possibly cost resources to maintain?

But, what I’d really like to see would be troop transports. Infantry are slow. APC’s are not. They’ve got no offense and minimal defense, but they’re cheap and they’ve got movement like a raider. What better way to deliver your bazooka wielding guerrillas to the jungle outside of your enemy’s base