I sometimes get a bit listless; the regular games, through no specific fault of their own, sometimes pall. Its a momentary thing usually, and most Normal People tend to go outside for some fresh air at this point. Me? I hit the free-trial circuit instead and just find a different slant on the same ongoing obsession.
Anyway, after reading this article a little while back:
Massively: First Impressions: Last Chaos
...and deciding that "Yes! I would really prefer to run through this dungeon in a leather miniskirt and some fishnet stockings!", I downloaded it and gave it a go. On reflection, I'm rather glad I did because its been ages since I had a really good rant, and I do worry old-age is bringing me a certain sense of tranquility and calm, which while good for blood pressure, can really hamper MMO blogging.
Despite being free, I'll go with the old Op. Cheapseats format, because I'm all about recycling here!
Last Chaos is available as part of the Aeria Games network, which you can sign up for free here:
Aeria Games
Once a member, which appears to want no credit card info, you can then navigate their rather busy website and download any of their games, of which Last Chaos is one. Payment is entirely microtrasnaction based, and done by paying roughly one U.S. Cent per 'Aeria Point', which you can then spend using special windows built into the UI of their games. This seems entirely optional, at first glance anyway...
In the Land of Medieval-topia, in the City of Trope, a Great Evil of Indeterminate Nature has probably arisen or something! Fortunately, Trope is home to an itinerant and large population of, like, adventures and stuff! Incapable of the skills necessary to land productive jobs in Investment Banking or Central Heating Installation, our brave Heroes pick up sticks and magic missiles and things, and set out to Do Battle! I expect!
I'm sorry... it probably does have a plot, but I couldn't find it. I must admit, I didn't look very hard though. You pick from a staggering list of SIX whole classes, each of one gender each, with almost four different faces and more than two hairstyles, and then are dropped in a tutorial dungeon containing nearly three rooms, and a corridor with a bend in it! There are also zombies! Adventure awaits!
Three Bad Things
- Primitive:
While the character models aren't actually awful, (just excruciatingly limited), much of the rest of the game world is, and resembles the kinds of dizzying graphical delights seen on launch-day Asheron's Call...ONE! The city buildings are decidedly cardboard-looking and generic, but not in that cute World of Warcraft way, and once outside, the surrounding world is essentially a slightly bumpy and most unbroken expanse of ropey mid-res grass texture, relieved only by the very occasional low-poly tree, and an inexplicably large assortment of mostly static animals and monsters.
At one point, I fell in what looked roughly like a river. I must have been mistaken however, as I simply carried on walking along the bottom, unconcerned about trivialities like oxygen. It didn't even do that blue fog thing; the Universal Gaming Signal for Being Underwater! I can only conclude that this game is actually fifteen years old and that I'd just never heard of it before, which is entirely possible, I guess. It also does not support wide-screen aspect ratios, which was annoying.
- Unbalanced:
I started life at level four, (for some reason I was never quite able to work out), with enough skill points to completely max out my starting Magic Missile skill, (once I'd worked out where the skill trainer was; they don't just advertise you know!) This seemed a quite powerful attack, and progressively testing it against more and more powerful monsters eventually had me delivering a fairly efficient and consistently repeatable arcane smackdown on these werewolf things twenty-four levels higher than me, by the simple expedient of Moving Away whenever they Moved Toward Me. I'm not sure if this game's designers had actually encountered the concept of Kiting before. Perhaps I just got lucky and accidentally picked on the one mob with no spell resistance, ranged attacks or movement debuffs; who can say?
On the other hand, upon dinging level five (w00t!), I was told that I was now eligible for my first 'Personal Dungeon' (a.k.a. Instance), a feature they seem inordinately proud of having thought up. I headed in, mostly to relieve the monotony of outdoor hunting, to be dumped in a room which looked identical to the initial tutorial place, only this time had an epic cut-scene of almost Guild Wars-esque proportions, consisting of just having the camera fly down the Corridor With A Bend In It, a little way. Tension mounts! I entered said corridor, mind filled with burning questions. Who is this mysterious flying cameraman? What is he looking for? Haven't I already cleared this Corridor With A Bend In It out in the tutorial? Turns out the answer to that last one is 'No',and I was immediately mobbed by six undead, ranging up to level 12. Group content I guess? No place for a Level 5 anyway, no matter how powerful my Magic Missile! God only knows what trying any of this as a 'Healer' class is like - I couldn't face trying any of it a second time through!
- Engrish:
I've nothing against Foreigners, you understand; some of my best friends aren't British, and they seem to lead full and rich lives, despite this crippling disability! But for the love...of...god... if you're going to try and sell a game with text in it, to the US/UK market, have at least one native speaker take a look at the quest text before you go gold! Its not rocket science, and while English grammar and spelling is apparently one of the harder and less logical things to pick up as a second language, I'm sure that having, say, a pretentiously verbose blogger, for example, do a 'second pass' on the translation, (for a very reasonable and no-questions-asked cash-in-hand remuneration!) would do wonders to preserve what little immersion exists in the game.
I mean I'm not even talking 'their' and 'they're' stuff here, or spelling Colour incorrectly, or 'it's' and 'its', (One I must admit being crap at myself!), although those kinds of slip do detract from the professionalism of a finished product. No, I found it quite hard work making meaningful and whole sentences out of the quest journal much of the time, and while worth a giggle initially, it soon gets irritating, and unlike something like WoW, where people just look for 'Kill' and 'Ten Rats' in the fluff and ignore the rest, out of laziness, here, its about the only way to get any sense out it.
It isn't as if it would be that big a job either; I only found two quest givers in the entire city.
Three MORE Bad Things:
- Stupid:
Such monsters that do exist are equipped with a pitifully inadequate AI. No linked/social aggro, proximity aggro of less than five feet in many cases, and they seem to have almost nothing in the way of special attacks or abilities. You just get near one, it turns and shuffles toward you, you wave arms at each other and eventually one of you dies, (Or you just kite the bejeesus out of them, at first giggling like a manic, and then after a while, almost crying in sympathy for the wretched thing.)
The monsters don't interact with each other in the slightest, as seen in the starting area where werewolves, wolves and foxes and deer live in apparent harmony, and while in all games there is a hidden understanding that monsters merely exist to cause fights and Adventure, nowhere is it more apparent than here, and these 'creatures' really are little more than mobile bags of improvement. They're not even especially mobile, thinking about it.
I only (ha!) fought monsters up of levels up to about thirty or so - its possible things get more elaborate further in - I couldn't say, or indeed, muster the will to find out.
- Grind:
Covered comprehensively in the Massively piece above, I can only agree. The thought of kiting werewolves over and over for the next four months gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. With this in mind, I went looking, as I do when the grind hits in any game, for Alternative Gameplay. (This process generally does not happen in my first, and as it turned out, only, session!)
There seems to be a rather involved, and quite expensive crafting side to the game, most of which hinges on harvesting resources from static ground nodes; Power Crystals, Shrubberies and the like, with expensive tools. I gave it a go on the crystals, harvesting chunks of Theta Wave Energy ("Kirk to Enterprise; Bollocks Sci-Fi Jargon Detected!"), and also some Yellow Leaf Herb things, or whatever they hell it was. Trouble is, unlike WoW, the nodes are permanently in place, and in reality, your haul is determined by a quite low percentage success dice-roll carried out every minute or so, leading to some very surreal scenes where several adventurers of varying types all standing stock still in a small fenced garden plot of 'Magic Herbs', silent but for the occasional rustling leaf sound effect. Meanwhile, a L15 Werewolf stands not ten feet away, ignoring us totally, probably out of an awkward, sympathetic and embarrassed awareness of the farce of it all.
Suffice to say that harvesting in Last Chaos makes Asteroid Mining in EVE Online look like a Snort-All-You-Can Buffet on Blackjack Night in a Strip Club with no 'No-Touching Rule'.
Apparently there is a dragon pet in there somewhere, but Reptilian Husbandry is a poor substitute of Engaging Gameplay, and anyway, I never saw one of the eggs you need to get started on all that.
Perhaps the most entertaining (this is still all relative, mind you) thing I came across was the slot machine Shrine of the Moon; architecturally the hub of the City of Trope. Sometimes, if you're really lucky, a recently butchered fox will drop a Moonstone, which can then be used in this shine as a token, which will let you press Start! and watch as a series of icons shuffle. If some of them match, (or something - the win-line combos were never made clear), you get a potion or other consumable, most of which I never worked out what did. The icons were quite pretty though, I guess!
- AFK:
In matters of inter-player economics, Last Chaos has opted for the 'Player Avatar as AFK Merchant' mechanic, a ridiculous idea that encourages wasted electricity, and the eventual destruction of the planet Earth thereby. If I knew what the antonym of Nifty! was, I'd start a new series, and this pathetic excuse for a mechanic would be #1. I first saw this in EQ1 (Luclin Bazaar), and hated it with a vehemence usually reserved for TV Talent Shows even then. EQ2 started with it too, but then at some point thought 'Hang on, this is a stupid idea, worthy of hatred reserved only for TV Talent Shows!', and put in a proper auction house broker system, like what WoW (and all other sane and right-thinking games) uses.
Basically, you put a load of loot in a separate part of your inventory, set some prices for it, go to The Selling Place, sit down, toggle 'Merchant Mode' on, then go down the pub/to bed/to saw your own head off. You then become effectively, an NPC merchant, with similar functionality. All very creepy as a customer too - the lights are on, but is anyone actually at home, peering at you as you rummage through their overpriced junkloot?
In this case The Selling Place is also the central plaza of Trope, which also has all the trainers and the slot machine on it, and....genius!....is the place where new players arrive for the first time after the tutorial instance thing. This almost killed my PC outright, as it seized up for the requisite three minutes it took to render all the AFK merchant-players, with accompanying wall of hover-text shop 'signs' so dense that I had trouble seeing one side of the plaza form the other. Probably trod on a lot of people lagging my way out of there to the city exit. Good.
My main problem with this crappy excuse for a mechanic is that unlike a more rational and sane Auction House variant, all these players still have to be connected, consuming vital bandwidth at the server end, even though they aren't actually playing in the slightest. It also looks a mess! Astonishingly, the game seems to have about fifteen servers, although I have no idea why. Perhaps simply to accommodate such a stunning amount of people logged in, but not actually there?
All in all, it was a funny few hours, although almost certainly not in any way the game's designers intended. It was also refreshing to have the opportunity to get really cross at something again. I'm generally far too mellow these days.
While an Aeria game in name, I gather that they are more in the line of importing MMOs, most likely from the far east, to the US/EU market, so this travesty of an online game is probably not entirely their fault, per se, but it is quite difficult to find out who is actually responsible for it; development and initial design-wise. Even Mobygames hasn't heard of it before.
A sterling testament to the importance of the quality of the newbie experience, and the first two hours of gameplay, and an experience I stumbled away from thinking 'Come back Project Entropia, all is forgiven!' While the allure of fishnets and leather miniskirts is strong indeed, those kinds of urges are far better catered for by Second Life™©®³ª^@έњⁿ, which despite having no gameplay at all, still does a better job of it than this nightmare of a MMO.
(No, really...look for 'Dark Life', if it still exists - an admittedly quite clunky, but surprisingly functional MMO, built inside SL™©®³ª^@έњⁿ itself.)
Final Verdict: You really do get what you pay for!
Ahh...catharsis... I feel cleansed! But don't despair, because morbidly curious as to whether all their games are quite so awful, I also tried out Aeria's 'Shaiya: Light and Darkness', and was pleasantly surprised, finding a game quite worthy of actually being taken seriously! More on that another time!
(Also, is it just me, or...
Separated at birth?)