It went OK. There were many, many more people around than usual, so resource-gathering quests were harder to finish but open-world group content was a lot easier. It's a game that looks to have a future, albeit one in which I shan't be participating. I maxed out my character's equipment and skills (even fishing, which is a grind), but there's an expansion due soon so I know that all my efforts will be worth very little when that happens.
I played the game for just over 600 hours, which is three times what I usually average before giving up. I did this because it has some interesting features:
- Weather and time of day affects when you can get to some zones.
- Time of day affects whether some zones are PvP or not.
- Time of day uses compressed time (days are 2 hours, nights are 30 minutes), deliberately chosen not to fit with real time.
- The cash shop is very cleanly done.
- I had to join a guild, and didn't like leaving my guildies in the lurch. You really do need to join a guild in this game.
- It relies much more on systems content than explicit quests.
The formal quests it does have are almost universally dreadful. The main story quest petered out and I barely noticed. The daily quests you get to do are dull and repetitive (very — you basically get to do ten a day in batches of five, and the second five can be the same as the first five).
Some aspects of balancing are nicely-designed, with a number of token-based caps to stop bots from looting indefinitely but not really getting in the way of ordinary play much. The diurnal cycle helped, too, in that if you wanted to do an instance then the best time was when it turned night and everyone got out of the open world dungeons because they didn't want to be PvPed; as a DPS, I rarely needed to wait more than a minute or two to do one of the two dungeons I bothered to learn (as a healer, I got in almost immediately; they're in short supply in T&L).
There are real-time hourly events in the game, some of which are group PvP, some of which are world boss fights, and some of which are basically kill-the-mob competitions. I won quite a few of the latter, probably because they're only popular among lower-level characters (it lowers your stats to level the playing field).
The main currency (s0lant) is way too easy to get. I had around 100,000,000 on both my characters when I quit. The cash currency (lucent) is rather interesting. You can get it in one of two ways: buying it with real money; selling stuff on the auction house. All the auction house transactions are in lucent, with a minimum price of 10 (which is about 17p). At low levels, you don't really get loot that you can sell for 10 lucent, so the temptation is there to buy some lucent so you can gear up. It wasn't there for me (I have a will of iron when it comes to cash shops), so I ground my way up instead. This wasn't all that onerous, really, and once I was getting sellable drops from mobs the floodgates opened. I'd play as normal, acquire some gear, use some of it to upgrade my existing gear and sell some of it for lucent. Once I had enough lucent to buy better gear, or better upgrades for my gear, I did so. As my main is maxed out, I only have my alt to spend it on now; I have about £6.20 worth of the stuff. Of all the miserable concepts of a cash shop that I've come across, this one is perhaps the cleanest: nothing is really hidden, and it's single-channel. If you're going to have a cash shop, this is as good a way to let people who don't want to buy your premium currency still engage with the game.
I did actually buy some lucent, by the way, for a battle pass. Its checkpoints were so easy to obtain in natural play that it was little more than a subscription. I approve of subscription models, so went with it. If players don't mind being tricked into paying for a month's subscription by renaming it a battle pass and making them work for their rewards, that's fair enough.
There isn't much of a crafting system. It's possible to craft objects, but you need to acquire the plans ("lithographs") and those only work once. There's not a lot of reason to craft gear anyway. Objects, rather than points, are used to improve items. If you want to upgrade (or change) one of the three properties each of your gear pieces has, you can do so by destroying an object of a similar kind that has the same property. You can also create "extracts" that you can sell on the auction house for lucent. Purple ones always work on purple gear; blue ones might work, but if they don't then they increase the chance of working next time. Greens aren't worth the bother. Selling two or three blue extracts every day on both characters (lucent is bound to accounts) is the bread and butter of T&L fund-raising.
The controls are of the awkward, console-friendly variety. S turns you round and moves you: you don't get to walk backwards except if you're in a fight. Q and E rotate rather than strafe. This is in "classic" control mode; "action" control mode is even worse.
Overall, the game is well-engineered but uninspired. Here are some further random notes on it:
- The water droplets on the screen when it's raining are a nice touch, but they're still there while you're teleporting. It rains in teleporter-transit land?
I can sell emotes to sundries merchants. If only that were possible in real life. I have some great exasperated sighs I've developed from teaching my students.
- Open dungeons turning PvP when it gets dark is an interesting idea, but the player top of the PvP leaderboard gets to call down eclipses every so often. This certainly isn't fun.
- It needs to make it clearer when you enter a PvP zone, especially when it covers the teleportation arrival point you innocently selected to do your innocent quest.
- "Rare pure gold" is rarer than "pure gold" how?
- When a world boss instance opens, there's a five-minute wait before the boss shows up. This is pretty good for socialising, and also for buying things off the auction house. I suspect this was planned, which makes it an official good idea.
- It's hard to tell who the designated tank and healer are in instances. If you're healing and you don't know who the tank is, that's a problem.
- There are lots of badly-described puzzles in the levelling game, but fortunately they peter out once you've finished what passes for the main quest.
- Crafting ingredients are everywhere, but there's nothing much to craft
- Stuns in fights are amazing except when they're used on you. I had three in my main's repertoire, and even beat occasional PvPers when I didn't get out of a PvP zone in time before they tried to gank me.
- There are pets called amitoi, which pick things up for you that drop from mobs you kill. You can also send them on missions to collect crafting materials that you have no use for whatsoever.
- Outfits are on sale in the cash shop for one week only. This is so people buy them from fear of missing out. That's a tactic that only works on players who know they could miss out, though. If the game doesn't tell you it's for one-week only, how would you know unless you took longer than a week to decide to buy something?
- There aren't any mounts, but there are morphs. These are creatures that your character turns into for fast movement. It's quite a nice way of doing it.
- Healing magic isn't very powerful, so it's all about when to use what you have in your armoury, rather than just spamming heals whenever their cooldown ends. This may be why there aren't many healers in the game.
- If you leave the area where a quest was given, you might have trouble finding where you need to go. Several quests send you to areas beyond where you were given them, so this can be quite annoying.
- There are some comically bad English accents in there.
- I was disconnected by the cheat detector at one point, no idea why
- There's a grappling-hook mechanic, which is the way to get up tall cliffs in T&L. It's quite a pleasant way to cut out long climbs, although it uses the same key (F) that interact-with-that-thing-right-in-front-of-me does, which at times means you're trying to pick some flowers and suddenly find yourself hurtlingskywards.
- My first character death was when I used a grappling hook. I was expecting to land at the top of a ship's mast, but was instead flung high into the air and expected to fly from there. I didn't know that, and died from fall damage.
- I'd have paid money to stop the goblin sales people from speaking to me.
- The early-game tutorial amitoi is meant to be cute, but it looked like a creepy Sackboy to me.
- When you get stuck in the architecture, it waits 30 seconds before moving you. The first time it happened to me, it teleported me a metre away. The second time, after the mandatory half-minute wait, it teleported me two metres away but kept me stuck in the architecture.
- The healing weapons (wand and bow) share cooldowns on their workhorse heals, which throws a real spanner in the works. I wasted a lot of lucent preparing a bow for healing duties and was not pleased when I read the small print of the skill-use instructions.
- As in many MMOs, sacks put up a real fight when you hook one while fishing.
In the end, on my paladin-like main I had a gear score of 4257 (anything 4000+ is impressive). This was despite running very few instances because I don't like having to learn yet more boss fights. It turns out I'm quite good at MMOs.
Right, now to focus on Star Trek Online (60 hours in and close to hitting the level cap, so I won't be playing it for much longer).
