I plan on making my Florensia update some time next week and hope to resume regular posting for most of January.

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.

Since I stopped playing Alganon two weeks ago, they have sent me two emails.

• The first was to advertise that they were giving away free mounts to all beta testers who wanted one. I did not log in to claim mine
• The second arrived last night and advertised that they really are completely intent on launching in ONE week.

They released a state-of-the-game article monday night to address a lot of their problems. To summarize it all as succinctly (and as snarkily) as possible:

Yeah, there are bugs, lots of bugs, but we’re actually actively patching things that should have been resolved before we declared open beta. We like crunch mode. Sleep is for mortals who plan ahead. We plan on “hitting” a magical launchable degree of quality before December, somehow.

We’ve finally fixed our billing system, so we can charge forners. Downloading the client works again.

We’re still in denial about our rip of WoW being a bad thing. We’re gamers writing a game for gamers, so clearly since we enjoy a bad copy of a polished product, all other “gamers” should too. We’re trying to copy as many features as humanly possible, regardless of the quality or ethics involved. People don’t complain about bugs, they complain about the “similarities” to “other games” they play. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel or even compete with anything vaguely shaped like a wheel.

Our players who use the forums have drunk the kool-aid. We believe that they will brainwash others, but we don’t want to “steal” players from other games, honest. We’re not in it for the money. We’re all about the ART, man. Clearly we’re not rushing to market to start recouping some of our development costs.

We are totally the first “real” fantasy MMO to launch in two years. Warhammer and Conan don’t count. Runes of Magic and Aion don’t count either. Neither does anything else imported from Asia…

We love you, please don’t hate us for being derivative.

I wish Alganon well, the crazy fools. Really, I do. I just don’t envy the worker drones who’re tasked with making this pig up at the last minute. Surely the insanity isn’t rampant throughout the entire company… just the public facing elements, right? Right? Oh well.

p.s. This week’s report on Ether Saga Online is 2/3 finished. I’ll try to publish it before end of day.

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

I am going to see how the play-along journal format works out. I’m kind of torn on it, but it’s what I’ve written so it’s what I’m posting. Just imagine that today is really Nov 4th and we’re skipping through days with every couple of paragraphs

Week 1: Dragonica

I’ve heard about Dragonica for a while now through banner ads but didn’t really give it a second thought. My first impression: cutesy korean mmo with all of the cookie cutter website components one expects. Seriously, do they sell MMO-in-a-Box or something at convenience stores over there? Dismissed the game entirely and thought nothing of it (like I do with the five or six other identical games I see this way every day).

Yesterday (the day I decided to torture myself), I got involved in a conversation on GamerDNA where someone had posted some of her screenshots of the game. After asking a few times for specifics on what distinguishes the game from everything else out there, the only answers I got were “pretty” and “no clicky combat”. Which… doesn’t really distinguish it from very much of anything imho. I almost decided against trying the game for week 1 when I read on their front page that the servers were planned for maintenance from 1000 to 1700 GMT+8. Ammon fails at math. GMT+8 != GMT-8 (where I am). So in stead of the game being down from 10am to 5pm my time, it finished patching at 1am, I think.

Away we go!

Registration and Download

Well, step one is to get the game, ne? Let’s see here… pointing browser at their site shows me a big animated floaty flash “SIGN UP” button. I think that’s probably what I want

Hah! I didn’t have to fill out the whole form. This game is published by IAH, and I’ve apparently already registered with them in the past… Yup. A quick check through my email shows that they’re the folks who’d done Granado Espada (a particularly boring game that suffers from one of the major sins of game design – it actively discourages you from playing). So I dug up my old credentials and I’m in. I didn’t even have to fill out the captcha for some reason… it was pre-populated for me. BOGGLE.

BOO! Registration failure number one: They require me to fill out a survey before letting me in. It’s not bad, but it’s longer than fits in my current browser window. Yup, and every question is mandatory. Double boo. What are my favorite online games? Ones that don’t gate registration by asking me what my favorite games are…

Registration was really comparatively painless there. At least the English was readable.

On to the download then. Hmm. They offer a number of download mirrors in Southeast Asia as well as a custom download manager of their own… Huh. I don’t trust that. I think I’ll just click the “official” download link and see what happens. 1GB. I’m getting a consistent 85-95Kb/sec… which translates to a 3 hour wait. Ok then, I’ll wait and poke at game info while I do.

Research and Waiting

The website is surprisingly informative. Often, all they give is poorly organized crud about how fantastical and amazing the experience of their Revolutionary Buzzword system is. This site impresses me by not being totally useless.

The first question I always ask myself is what classes are available, and what can I expect from them. Often, the name of a class doesn’t necessarily mean any similarity with previous offerings. For instance, I recall one particular game (that I won’t mention because I’ve mentioned already) where the Scout class was the game’s primary healer. Scout. As in traps and daggers. And rez. Anyhow, I’m not talking about GE, really I’m not.

So I click on “Classes” under Guide on the page’s top nav menu. And behold, I’m given a wealth of information and a link to a skill tree calculator. Duly impressed.

And it looks like we’ve got a class promotion system… with some fairly predictable class choices. Looks like a choice of four basic classes at the beginning followed by a choice of a specialization at 20… and a class rename at 40 (no choice there, just a new name, but that’s pretty standard).

Most of the classes are largely predictable with two exceptions. Archer is a top tier class and Healer is a subclass of mage. This implies that people are probably healing themselves so one can safely discount playing as a healer – unless their buffs are awesome. This also implies that it might be possible to play as an archer without getting chewed to pieces in melee. I think I’ll go that route, since it’s not always an option

The tier two archer classes are “hunter” and “ranger”, words that I like to use interchangeably when describing a certain type of character. It turns out that hunter means the more traditional hunter type with a net attack and some improved archery sorts of abilities (and a wolf summon and a few self buffs and a rocket launcher). By “ranger”, they mean more of modern army spec ops ranger with a plethora of fun toys like machineguns and summoned tanks and grenades and homing missiles and the highest rate of fire in the game. I know which one I’m picking if I actually play through 20.

The download has since slowed down – I’m looking at 5 hours and counting. Aaah, the joy of games without reliable western hemisphere download servers.

Looking at more of the site, I find a map of all keyboard options. This is nice, most games only tell you this in-game, and you have to know the secret button to bring up the help in the first place. Heh, emotes are hotkeyed.

A couple hours of actual productivity at work later, I checked back and the download has completed.

Installation and Startup

It looks like a pretty standard installer with an open beta license agreement that must be clicked through. They are kind enough to display the minimum system requirements (which in this case can be summed up as just any machine manufactured in the last 5 years). Naturally, they try to put it in an “ego folder” with the company’s name… but whatever, it’s a standard issue installer. At least it’s fully translated and doesn’t have broken characters on buttons

Aaand they install HShield. Boo on them. I really should start running these games in a VM to protect myself.

Patch server took a while to respond. Of course the game installer I downloaded from their official main link isn’t even close to current. I would time it, but I’ve got better things to do. Regardless, it’s taking long enough that I should probably get something to eat while I wait.

One trip to the break room to scavenge leftover (free!) pizza later…

I click start and get to wait while a bit longer while it launches the actual client – windowed 1024×768. The interface is pretty and high resolution. It shows clear kMMO heritage in the ui chrome, but it works.

I have to choose both a server and a channel. This is interesting. Channels are basically instances of the world accessible by all characters from the server. There is no description of the differences between the servers. All I have to go on here is whether I want “Kaye”, the blue dragon with horns and glasses or “Elga”, the purple dragon with red wings and earrings. I think I’ll go with Kaye, it being the first one on the list and also appearing to be the less populated of the two (overcrowding means more competition for mobs to grind).

Looks like I have four character slots, being watched over by the aforementioned dragon. Apparently it wasn’t glasses, it was a monocle she(?) is wearing. Character selection screen is clean and largely intuitive. If the whole game’s UI is like this, that’ll be happy stuff. And character creation is likewise very slick, if a bit overly cutesy. I get a feeling I’ll be choking on the cutefulness soon enough so I may as well get used to it now.

First Session

Game is side scrolling action in the vein of Maple Story and others, in case I hadn’t mentioned that before.

I have a shoulder faerie of sorts. It is cyan and is named Pororing… which I’m pretty sure is one of the textbook names for cute little slime creatures everywhere (poring and poporing are some of the first mobs one encounters in Ragnarok Online). The little faerie drowns me with exposition, which basically sums up as “young hero, venture forth and slay the dragon, but level up some first, k?” They then let me into a movement tutorial… which quickly turns into a “save the villagers” quest given by a little blond girl with a voiceover in what I can only assume is Korean. Beautiful quest info dialog, good item tooltips over rewards.

Seriously? Three guys in platemail with halberds can’t take one cartoony wolf? Heh. Oh well, they tell me where to find the kill button and let me go. My first usability complaint is that everything is zoomed in waay too close to be comfortable as an archer. Maybe I can find some kind of display option for this, but I doubt it. Ooh, nope. Mouse wheel out zooms enough to be tolerable.

Turn in my quest and enter the first town…

Woo! Halloween! The decorations are fun. Heh, I wonder how that is going to skew my experience here.

The minimap is nice with obvious icons for points of interest showing where I pick up quests, etc… Four quests at once as a kMMO newbie? Right on. Now if this amount of content actually continues, we might have something here. Fetch a cake or someone who’s too lazy to walk half a screen over… sure, why not. While idling in town a bit, I catch some of the global chatter… and it is a mix of Thai, someone selling some drops, and someone shouting for help in all caps

And I am 18% to level when I’m ready to leave town to do my first set of real missions (two to kill sheep and two to kill trees). I ding 2 off of the first sheep pull. After a bit of searching, I find the skill tree to handle my level up… and I apparently have 20 skill points?! But for whatever reason, the abilities I have to choose from all cost 15 or 20. That sort of needless inflation irks me. Unless I start finding ways to earn these skill points 2 or 3 at a time, this is a failure of design. Regardless, I spend 15 of my points on the Moonwalk ability (to jump backwards out of melee range) – it is really just a pre-req to the Moonwalk Shot ability that looks much more fun.

Killed a few more things, dinged 3, returned to town and ran around turning in quests.

Moonwalk Shot wound up being fun but a bit of a finger-twister to use – it’s a combo that requires you to fire off both abilities in rapid succession, but it is surprisingly effective as a primary attack right now, so I’ve been dpsing things down with it

Grind, grind, quest, grind, quest…

Completing all of the realistically soloable missions in the first town takes me to level 8. This includes repeating the first instanced sort of content four times, each at increasing difficulty – but curiously enough, my final score was higher with each successive completion. These replayable missions look like the best source of equipment and exp in the game and seem to be geared toward parties of low level characters. I have a mission to complete the final level of this instance, but it highly highly recommends at least two people (possibly requires it), and I’ve not seen enough locals to stick around waiting to form a group.

I did see some of what I assume is Halloween event content in my two latter instance runs, they added some pumpkin headed npc to the boss encounters who dropped a cosmetic drop. I now have a little mutant bat hovering over my shoulder in addition to the little mutant pororing faerie thing. The major difference between the two seems to be that the bat is actually locked in place exactly behind my head at all times, and he doesn’t pop up modal dialogs telling me how to equip pants.

The other two missions I have left are to hunt down rare spawns. This upsets me a bit since I bumped into and killed something unique previously – and can only assume it was one of the mobs I have a mission to drop now. I think I am going to look for the next town now, maybe murder everything in my path while I head out there.

The Moonwalk is getting a bit easier to use by now, and it is probably the only reason I survived the 4 star Big Bad Wolf instance boss, but the control scheme is still a bit off to me. The amount of movement my left hand is having to engage in is really counter-intuitive to what I am used to in an MMO. X is the kill button, C is the jump button, so I’m shifted down into carpel tunnel land with my hand slid almost entirely off of the keyboard. Skill hotkeys can go into QWER/ASDF, and they default the level 1 skill to A. I tried moving it around, but that felt even stranger. I have bound Moonwalk to D and Moonwalk Shot to S, so I tap DS to strafe and it seems to work, but it’s tricky switching between that and normal shooting (which at least lets me hold the key down to keep shooting) and my big gun on A.

Halfway to the second field area, I actually encountered one of the rares I need to kill (so they are probably not all _that_ rare if I’ve already seen both of them). Unfortunately, a mage came along and I did not get credit. Kill stealing in this day and age? Seriously? Have they learned nothing? Dialog with quest NPC’s also leads me to believe that loot theft (or at the very least intra-party ninja looting) is a very real possibility – this is probably why the final instance rewards are handed out via a modal dialog in stead of simply dropped on the ground like everything else.

I shake off my bitterness at losing the kill and head out to the second field, the one marked level 3+.

Upon entering the level 3+ zone, the first thing I notice is that I am being swarmed by level 6-10 mobs now. Come to think of it, my very first kill after the few puppies in the intro sequence was a level 5 “upgraded” sheep, a few feet from the entrance of the “level 1+” zone. Looks like we’ve got some standard issue level inflation going on where players are expected to grind mobs 3-5 levels higher than them. At least that’s better than RF Online where fighting anything less than +7 was a complete waste of downtime that could have been better spent idling in the mines. Also, I _am_ level 8 by the time I feel basically done with the first field, so I am actually at level for the mobs in the zone, despite what the sign at the entrance said.

The second thing I notice after clearing the mobs that jumped me upon entering the zone is the presence of quests marked very clearly on the map. One daily mission (complete with a blue bang) and a yellow marker (which turned out to be a wanted poster listing 3 more rare spawns to hunt). So… the quest content has rapidly dropped from interesting and sufficient to advance meaningfully to a daily grind mission and boss hunting. Not surprised, really. Perhaps I will just keep plowing through until I find the next quest hub, perhaps they’ll have real missions for me in town two after all.

Second Session

Ok, I’ve given my arm a good rest and am back for more punishment. I don’t remember actively associating video games with physical pain since playing marathons on the old NES controllers twenty years ago. It’s kind of nostalgic, but mostly it just reminds me that I’m old.

On a whim, I checked the other server this time, and sure enough, my character doesn’t exist over there. Kaye it is then.

Awesome! Upon this new login, the game asked me if I wanted to date one of the other newbies in my zone. No thank you.

30 minutes and 54 kills later, I am 70% to level 9 and have to take a break for my arm and play some Torchlight in stead.

The second field is largely identical to the first, just with higher level mobs – most of which are reskins of the first zone’s. Nothing surprising there, but it’s worth recording. The further I get, the more varied the mobs seem to become. I’m no longer facing homogeneous groups of wolves or spiders or sheep, but am getting different skins of wolves with a spider or two mixed in for projectiles. The encounters are becoming a bit more challenging, but strafing backward and firing constantly still seems to be a viable strategy for 90% of the pulls.

Was unable to bring myself back to the game after the break. Physical pain really is a strong deterrent to my interest.

Other Sessions

Tried second instance, it was essentially identical to the first one, just with higher level mobs.

Apparently the quest limit is 7 at a time – which, conveniently enough, is conveniently the number your tracker can display at once. I had to drop some low level rare mob hunting missions to pick up new ones in the 3rd field – which featured a real quest hub. No new town in sight yet.

I was unable to solo the 3rd instance at level 9, but then again, the recommended levels for the first version of it were 10-11.

After dinging level 10, the monotony really started to set in. I acquired new and interesting ways to kill things, but that really just meant more ways to play twister with my left hand. My basic special which knocks things down apparently knocks them into the air first… and I can combo with an ability to juggle mobs in the air, as long as I’m only dealing with two at once. Versus a group of three or more, doing so just leaves me open to attack. Also, the new attack is useless versus bosses since they are immune to knockback.

Eventually, I hit level 12 or 13 before I completely gave up. Playing in higher level maps is certainly more interesting, but it really is all the same thing over and over again. The side-scrolling nature of things only adds to the monotony. In a normal side-scrolling console video game, you cover a LOT more ground than here… and the map is at least two dimensional. Dragonica maps are 1.5d lines that you pace up and down ad nauseum.

Combat

Combat is fast and frenetic, as promised. It looks like most attacks have at least some area effect to them, but I kept finding myself relying on normal attacks and mobility more than specials, and not just because the game is nursing some fierce hatred for my left wrist. The special attacks available to my archer are really not that much more potent than sustained rapid arrow fire – and they cost mana. Specials seem designed for burst – not sustained – damage. This ain’t Everquest style cooldown whack-a-mole, there’s a lot more effort required to activate everything. Many attacks seem to depend on combinations or movement patterns to be useful anyway.

The game keeps a combo meter every time you hit an enemy without more than a 2 or 3 second break in between. Once you hit a fairly low combo level, you start getting bonus exp for the resultant kills. The highest combo I noticed was around 100, and I think I was getting +30% xp near the end.

Mobs are goofy and predictable. Attacks all seem to happen on the left-right axis, so stepping forward or backward is a great way to dodge an enemy’s attack or miss with one of your own. Every so often, a mob you kill will fly off into the screen and leave a crack like broken glass, I would not be surprised if these were the results of crits made at a sufficient combo level.

Art and Music

Cute characters with big heads. This extends to mobs as well as players. Even the spiders you fight in the first zone are kind of cute for spiders.

The game is all side-scrolling, and the places where the map is not actually 100% horizontal detract from it a bit, bumping into walls when you should have just been able to run in a straight line, etc… But because of the boring side-scrolling nature of the bulk of the map, they really can afford to do some interesting things with background art. The backgrounds are all pretty nice, but the foreground elements tend to get on my nerves.

The music is entirely forgettable, soulless derivative fare. It’s not bad or detracting, it is just literally devoid of anything to mention. Not one tune caught my attention or stuck in my head, despite the long hours spent playing with the volume at a quite audible level. Perhaps it was just drowned out by the sound of my wrists cracking?

Stability

There were a few hints of stability concerns while I played. Once, the game crashed when quitting, and once it crashed my video drivers while logging in… Not sure what to make of it, neither instance impacted my actual ability to play, but they are evidence that there are a few concerns with the client. I also got randomly disconnected several times, in a variety of situations and zones – which did impact my ability to play.

I give the client a B- for stability. The crashes never happened during actual gameplay, and the network hiccups only took me back to the login screen..

Final Grade

Dragonica is an amusing diversion. I could not, however, even begin to conceive of spending money on it. I give it a 6 out of 10.

Afterthoughts

I was not able to get into crafting or grouping. I was not able to really figure out what the whole smashing items apart for souls was all about. I was not able to reach the second full service town or do a class upgrade.

I don’t think any of these elements would have changed my opinion much, but they might have extended my interest in the game a few more hours.

What’s Next?

For week 2, I am going to look at Alganon, which launched open beta yesterday.

The rules are simple. Every week for the next 50+ weeks, I am going to try to choose a free to play mmorpg or one for which I have acquired a nda-free beta invitation. I will register and download and install and play the game. I will attempt to play one character to a decent level and maybe attempt an alt if time/interest allow. I will catalog/tag broad features and elements of the game to allow for easy comparison between all games thusly reviewed.

Schedule-wise, I will attempt to post on Wednesdays. This gives me a running start into the weekend.

I will accept suggestions, but lacking a suggestion will otherwise choose games that jump out at me from banner ads or mmorpg.com over the course of the week, etc… Games chosen will go into a queue and the next new game will be announced when the previous game’s review is posted.

In the case of games I have attempted before but haven’t ever formally reviewed… I’m not entirely sure what to do. I think that many of them are worth consideration and a second chance, so they will likely find their way onto the queue – but I promise to avoid doing two re-reviews in a row and will extend that to a promise that I will attempt to avoid largely similar games on successive weeks.

In the event of closed beta sorts of games where I’m not at liberty to disclose details, I will attempt to maintain my regular schedule in addition to closed beta duties… and will try to produce an end-of-nda sort of review if at all possible.

All that being said, I will begin the torture tomorrow