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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
"Besides arguing, there is another way to resolve bigger conflicts: the law. Unlike any other game, players are allowed, within certain limits, to change the rules of the game. For this they first need to write a petition outlining the law they want to introduce, for example not allowing players to place their house closer than 100 feet to another player's house. They then need to collect a certain number of signatures from other players that support this petition."
"For example the first test of Art requires that you build a statue, and get 20 players to look at it and judge it interesting."
"ATITD is a very social game, supporting both individual and collective achievement. It is possible for everyone to just playing for himself, but not very effective. To advance your personal path through the tech tree, you often need tools that are quite expensive to build but infrequently used. So forming a guild which shares its tools makes a lot of sense. Public-spirited individuals or guilds can even make their tools available for use to everybody else.
So while there is no combat, there is most certainly the possibility of conflict. Sharing property in a group is not always easy. And everything you do, affects the other players. Build a house in which to place your tools, and at the very least you prevent somebody else from placing a house at the same spot, or block somebody else's view. Build and operate a mine, and you will cause pollution, making somebody else's sheep sick and flax wither. You are changing the world all the time, and that can have positive or negative consequences."
My prediction: This game is absolutely ripe for the picking by people who are good at backstabbing and sycophantry. People who are highly skilled and socially unskilled will be reduced to workerbees, while the PHB types will wind up cliquing their way to the top and lording it over the rest. I can't wait to see this...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
just how much crafting a massive online gamer would like to do
Perhaps they should craft themselves some running shoes, and lose some of that mass?
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Collecting wood is a simple as clicking on a tree, then waiting 60 seconds for the wood to respawn.
What fun! That's definitely worth $13.95/month. I can't wait for the "paint drying" mod.
Indeed. And the key to keeping the workerbees from all turning against you in such a situation is to pit them against each other by defining arbitrary lines between them.
In real life the upper class pits the Union worker against the migrant farm worker.
In a MUSH Joanne pits her flirtees against Lisa's.
In ATITD2, I am assuming that the workerbees will be led to vote for and against things by the designated popular person (maybe even a former workerbee, but also likely to be a vapid uberflirter). They'll naturally form cliques as a result (I think it's called a "cult or personality"?), and opposing cliques will duke it out with words and votes. Of course, the people at the bottom who support the survival of the ones on top will be fighting amongst themselves and will not see the big picture.
I'm not saying the upper class will be running a conspiracy; this is just how they get when they're elevated to that position. The danger is in that no one really realizes the box that they're in, and that they're being played.
The danger is that pollution will run rampant in this virtual world, and other tangibly, measurably bad things will happen, as cliques use their popularity muscle to get their way on things.
Depending on how well ATITD2 is implemented, you could be looking at an accurate representation of Earth in a digital petri dish...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Gamespot reviewed "Real Life" once. It got a 9.6, but that's a really subjective opinion....
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.
First the good. You could download the game and play for free to see if you liked it. This is a very, very good thing. That the Star Wars Galaxies & others don't do this says a lot. There is also a Linux client.
The free period has some restrictions on what you can do, but it gives a good taster for the game. So I paid for an extra month and played during that period.
Additionally the play world is truly massive. You can wander around, find a spot by the river and start building a little village. Join a guild and everyone can start communal factories specialising in one thing or another. In theory therefore you have a little community and you could barter with another community, specialise in one particular thing and so forth. Still, you have to good at doing something and that means a lot of time is spent producing 'things' to trade with.
If you become bored by the constant grind of producing items you can become an artist or a politician. For example a politician can have laws enacted into the game (e.g. rotten flax becomes public property after 20 minutes). An artist can make sculptures that others can rate. There is also points to be had for leading newbies through their initial tests, so you'll find yourself being helped as soon as you enter the game.
As the world as a whole advances you can contribute surplus items to advance the world's technology. For example give enough of one thing and oil suddenly becomes available and with it items that require oil as a component.
Did I mention there was no killing? Yup the whole game is communally based, although there was a ritualised combat game (think Yuh-gi-oh) you could play, though I never did.
Now the bad. The intent of the game is that you wander the desert and set up shop where you start weaving, baking bricks etc. This becomes exceptionally tedious. Making anything is extremely long winded. Collect straw and mud to make bricks, dry bricks on a rack (made from wood you gathered and planed), make a kiln, pour water on mud to get clay, spin clay into pots, fire pots, use pots to collect water to make more pots. Look forward to this because this is your life. If you're not doing that you're growing flax, collecting thorns to make a flax comb etc. Did I mention it is tedious? If you're lucky, you find some generous soul has donated some equipment such as kilns and forges to the community. If you're unlucky you'll have to make them from scratch too. The tedium can be broken by creating works of art, or fishing or other pursuits, but this game is one long Skinner box. That's not to say other MMPORGs are any different, but ATITD turns it into an artform.
Now the world is massive, but it looks the same. The graphics are pretty sucky too. I'm sure the real Egypt is grass and sand too, but it could still be made more interesting than it is. Wandering from one end of the world to the other to collect seeds or fungus, takes ages and is also very tedious even when you gain waypoints
So all in all, ATITD feels more like a brave but failed attempt to produce a communal game.
It's hard to tell what the second version is like without downloading it (the screenshots are postage stamp size), but my opinion is that ATITD2 would be better if it included: