Having got through a somewhat involved tutorial, which I suspect gives a fair impression of the complexity of the game as a whole, its time to find myself a place to call home in Ancient Egypt. The game gives you a number of locations you can teleport to to start a new life, which by the look of it seem to be banners errected by the existing citizens for this very purpose. Also, for the first 24 hours of life, the new player can 'reroll' on this chart, offering a way to see quite a lot of the world without all that tedious running about everywhere.
I say tedious, because A Tale in the Desert is pretty damned big, geographically. There seems to be no mounts that I've found yet, and although there are Chariot stops dotted few and far between, which offer a kind of fast travel as found in other MMOs, travel in general, takes a very long time. I suppose there's something to be said for a world where distance means something, and despite being essentially a vast desert, there's still quite a lot to see on the way; player outposts and dwellings, sculptures and mini-game puzzles dotted about, and of course, pretty much everything is a resource of some description.
The world seems to be divided up in to geographic regions. Each has a set of schools and universities, a chariot stop, and its own regionwide chat channel. These seem to form hubs, mini communities within the greater nation as a whole. Stumbling through one of these, I gained Level 2. A nearby University of the human Body had one of the Tests on offer, which go to make up the 'game' of ATitD, providing some kind of direction and purpose to an otherwise very literal sandbox experience. The Principles of the Human body involves locating and tagging 35 types of plant species, within a 20 minute time limit, which started as soon as I asked about it. Don't panic!
A hectic time ensued, but fortunately, I think I was somewhere near the Nile at the time, and despite the parched nature of the setting, there seems to be a bewildering variety of trees, shrubs and grasses dotted about. I finished the thing with about three minutes to spare, and viola! Ding! After a lifetime of beating unreasonable quotas of monsters to death, I can quite appreciate a system that requires no killing at all to advance in life.
Much desert nomadry later, I found a School of Architecture, offering another test. For this one, I have to build a Compound, which seems to function as player housing of a sort, although these do seem to be more 'workshop' than the generic 'trophy room' of most other MMOs. A large proportion of the various tools and equipment needed to get on in life can only be built inside one of these, so it's time to settle down and pick out a base of operations.
In the end, I picked out a coastal area somewhere around where the present day town of Bi'r Shalatayn is today, on the Red Sea, at the border between modern day Egypt and Sudan. The world map isn't an exact replica mind you, and ATitD Egypt seems to stretch far to the south of it's modern borders, across into Libya, Chad, Saudi Arabia and beyond. The area seems sound, having all the resources I'd been shown how to gather in the tutorial, and more. A not too distant collection of the different schools and not far from a crossroads, although the fact that there's hardly any other dwellings nearby does make me wonder. It's about half an hour's run to the nearest Chariot Post hub, with it's universities and such, which might be a problem later on, but I like the spot and it'll do for now!
The Compound comes with a neat little blueprint editor, allowing you to go crazy, and then presents you with a list of materials to be loaded into it, before it becomes real, which makes you uncrazify the design when you see how much of the resources I'd never even heard of yet, it needs. One more modest proposal later, it was time to get busy with the Brick Racks, Flax Fields and Wood Planes. Further work with the gathering and processing is then needed, to double the default starting size, and qualify for the test. Ding! Level 3! Saying that, it certainly wasn't a trivial labour, and took me two session of play to complete.
Quite enjoyed the industry of it all, but more than that, I'm absolutely captivated by the "one-man game of Civilisation" of it all; working out what resources and tools and training is needed to increase my own personally technology tree. So far, I'm still in my own personal Stone Age, with Flint being the most advanced material I can sort out for myself. Hoping to discover Bronze soon though! Hauling myself up form savagery by my own bootstraps. One reason I do so badly in RTS games, is that I get endlessly distracted by the fascinations of the tech tree in those too, and instead of building up cheap units and zerging out, I dig in and refuse to even mount an offensive until I've worked up to the orbital lasers or whatever.
In this game, I suspect it's distracting me from the very required social elements of life in Egypt. It's a game where cooperation is probably a must, in a great many aspects of society. For example, my currently open 'Principles of Leadership' test needs nothing more than 21 other players sign my bit of paper. I've got three so far. It's a game with a very large landmass and very low population, (About a thousand, if the University of Leadership census page is to be believed), most of whom probably all know each other very well. To get on, I'll have to get involved, but for now, I'm shamelessly indulging in what has probably got to be the best crafting game I've ever played, curious to see just how Civilised I can make myself, by my own efforts alone...