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ATITD2 Early Impressions
Darniaq writes "While a relatively small game as defined by player count, A Tale in the Desert was a rather robust experiment into just how much crafting a massive online gamer would like to do. The game is also more evocative of a massive online real-time strategy game than a roleplaying one ala Everquest or City of Heroes. And now there's a sequel. The staff at Grimwell.com has temporarily relocated to Egypt, and provides a live report."
Yes, all I ever wanted to do on an online MMO was grind... yup, nothing else. Grind grind grind grind grind, woohoo so much fun it feels like work! But instead of getting payed, I pay them, sweet! /sarcasm
More and more realistic games, imitating life in so many subtle ways. Yes, to grow carrots you need water and jugs to carry water and soil to plant the seeds in...
I wonder why one doesn't just go outside and experience that free-for-ever massive online game called REAL LIFE!
I assure you: it has far more surprises, and is far more difficult than anything you ever tried on your computer.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
This is exactly the pattern of old MUSHes and MOOs -- the 'nerd' type will sit and create, and the 'social networker' type will form a overclass that ultimately decides the atmosphere and direction of the community.
There will always be 2 approaches to getting 20 people to say your statue is interesting:
1 -- Build an interesting statue.
2 -- Flirt.
Still, it's interesting to watch the patterns develop... I might even try playing in fact.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I'm dreading the day the Alone in the Dark movie, from the 'great' mind which brought House of the Dead to the big screen is released. The only thing worse than having a great series be forgotten, as Alone in the Dark pretty much is now, is to have it associated only with a bad movie in the minds of most people.
As Samuel Clemens once pseudomonously wrote, and I now paraphrase: "There are wealthy men, who at great expense hire coaches and dress in their Sunday finery to be driven about the countryside. Yet if those same men were approached with the same carriage and coat and asked to ride the coach for pay; they would refuse, because that activity would be the provenance of work and not fun at all."
While you advocate a return to "real life", which you find to be fun, challenging and difficult; there are others who couldn't care two figs and a rolling boll weevil for your opinion of the grandiosity of the real world. That we are paid in the real world for performing the same real activities as imagined activities makes those activities the provenance of work, even if all we are paid in is satisfaction of a job well done. We wish to have fun and at great expense we pay others to give us fun. That is our choice and it is the right one for us.
So, I propose a solution: you have your fun on the cheap, as it were, in real life and let those of us who can afford to have our fun at great expense to do so. Our chosen activity injures you not at all and complaining because our form of entertainment is not your chosen form of entertainment is not only useless, but massively condescending. I don't remember inviting you to condescend to me.
Ezyak ! It seems that we will never vote for real in Egypt, I will settle for the simulated real voting for the time being until something can be done about the real simulated voting.
I only played the 24 hours they gave a couple of months ago, and that is quite the impressions I got.
/.er said, the tech advances you get later lets you avoid that grinding, and since you grinded before, it makes you appreciate that tech even more :) . And the grinding in this game have something... zen. Unlike other games, you're not really grinding for XPs, you're actually *want* the item you're crafting, not the XPs associated with it, and I like that.
:), if I wasn't in process of giving NWN RP side a second chance, I would probably be trying the beta. (I'm not a student anymore. I don't have 20 hours a week to give to games...)
I think that the game basics are *very* interesting. The graphics are not so bad, I think that it is the interface that could be improved, namely character control and inventory management (that's the 2 things I remember that didn't impress me).
Well, in fact, probably that if I played that game when I wasn't soo busy in my life with other things, I would still play. The grinding didn't bother me that much. As another
In 2nd fact
perception is reality
I find it interesting that people that want to create "realistic" worlds like this, invariably eliminate the ability to kill other players.
As distasteful as that might be to the sensitivities of some of the programmers and players fleeing the kill-everything gaming world, the fact is that the idea of killing & death - either the fear of it or the causing of it (and no, you can't respawn or get another account) is INTEGRAL to the behavior of people, cultures, religions, everything that makes us human.
Earlier posts above referred to the typical pattern of these games, where there are nerdy types that end up as workerbee crafters, and there are social-types that invariably end up running things. However, the ultimate governor to all this is the fact that in the Real World (tm) if someone is exploited enough, they may just kill their exploiter.
It has laws? Well, the funny thing is that in a game, laws are mandatory while in Real Life (tm) they are simply consensual. Perhaps enforced strictly, but still consensual. If the law is passed that says "houses can't be built within 100 feet of each other", in a game, the game engine simply prevents this from ever happening.
IRL (tm), someone could STILL build their house 50' from yours. The question is: what are you going to do about it? Is it worth fighting about? How about if we pool a little of each of our money, and have a group that their JOB is to make sure they have more force to keep our rules in place than someone could muster to break them.
Of course then your problem is, who watches the watchers?
Read the Story of the Jesse Wall (by Wagner James Au, IIRC) in the Second Life website. Linden Labs created a killable zone, and the example was far closer to a Hobbesian state of nature (and, IMO, more like early societies) than the idyllic crafter communities that some people like to imagine that 'noble savages' lived in.
Ironically, the results were positively medieval. On the one hand, some of each group were thrashing it out with violence which was really only escalating things (and eventually, the WW2OLers *would* have either been wiped out, or reduced to a pathetic rump state which enough of the majority pitied enough to leave extant).
On the other hand, a large number of people appealed to the admins to "FIX SOMETHING!" (ie. religion). Ultimately, it was only resolved in a gamey fashion: the intervention of Linden Labs, the cordoning off of people into certain zones, and game-enforced bans. Too bad, we could have really had an interesting experiement.
Unfortunately, we don't HAVE an admin@universe.net IRL that can set the rules to no-PK in this world, no matter how much we appeal to them, so we're better off studying models that realistically represent behavior than these stilted artificialities.
-Styopa
You said that when someone dies, they can't get another account. Totally unenforceable, not to mention suicide for a for-profit business. The jackasses of the world will get new accounts, play for a few days, go on a killing spree, then repeat.
What all games lack by their nature is true accountability. The worst that can possibly happen to you is you can't play that one game anymore, but there are always hundreds of other games, plus real life, waiting for you. Everyone quits a game eventually, and when they do, they might as well go out with a bang. But most people don't commit suicide even once in their lives. Thats a major difference. Another major difference is lack of persistence. You can't be on call to defend your property 24/7 in a game, if you have a life. Real life is persistent. In games people log in and log out and can only be expected to be there a small fraction of the time, and not the same fraction of time that others are there. These fundamental differences make total realism with regard to violence unworkable.
Unrestricted PvP totally changes the nature of the game. Not everyone wants to pay to log into a game just to watch their back the whole time. You went afk for a few minutes to answer the phone? Too bad, you're permanently dead. There are PvP games out there to choose from, but they tend not to do as well. If thats really what people want, they're sending the wrong messages to the market.
While the player count is smaller than most commercial MMORPGs, all of the players are on a single server, whereas most larger games are split up into several shards. Also, each player in atitd has lots of buildings, so their presence is felt even when they aren't online.
Thus, while the total subscriber count may be less, the few thousand players all sharing the same world, and all having a noticeable affect on it, still qualifies it as "massively" multiplayer, instead of just being a MORPG.
The differences of atitd compared to nearly every other mmorpg makes it newsworthy and interesting to follow (and the fact that it has a linux client doesn't hurt its chances of getting a mention on slashdot.) If this were generic fantasy murder simulation number 500, then it would be flying under the radar with only a few thousand subscribers.