And the winner is ...

I already mentioned how difficult it is to judge MMORPG if you constantly compare them to your expectations, and those expectations are growing. So I don't give ratings in my reviews, I just say what features I liked and what I didn't like. But today I'm going to give some sort of relative rating: Of all the games on my hard disk, which one did I end up playing this weekend. In the best tradition of award ceremonies, I'm going to list the games that I didn't play, or didn't play much, first, and the winner at the end.

Ragnarok Online I was still in my free 15 days trial period. But RO hadn't fascinated me at all. I think it is mainly the lack of quests, the lack of goals. You just run around at random and try to hit monsters before somebody else gets there first. So I uninstalled RO and don't plan to ever go back there.

Puzzle Pirates I have paid for 6 months, because it is comparatively cheap. But all I did this weekend was log in, check out that everything was okay with my shop, and log out again. Another game where I have run out of meaningful goals. You are supposed to collect money for bigger and bigger ships. But for bigger ships you would need a bigger crew, and those simply don't happen. It's a case of too many chiefs, not enough indians: Everybody wants to be an officer and command his own ship, as that is simply more fun. I am also a bit disappointed about the lack of development, the number of puzzles is small, and hasn't grown in the last couple of months.

City of Heroes, my account is cancelled, but I can still play until the end of the current billing period, which is in 2 weeks. I played this for maybe an hour or two this weekend. But unfortunately many of my guild mates have either already quit, or are at least not playing that much any more, and I was the only one from my guild online. It is possible to have fun for some time playing solo, but it is not as exciting as group combat. It is still a game I recommend to everybody to check out, both for new players to the genre and veterans. But don't take more than a 3-month subscription, it doesn't have more staying power than that.

Asherons Call, I think I wasted my $12.95 on. My main motivation in buying this was that I have always regretted having "missed" one of the major games of the early era. I played it for a few hours this weekend, but it didn't really enchant me. Graphics are bad, but that was expected. Unexpected was the curious experience of getting too much loot. You leave the newbie training as level 5, kill the first grunt in the vicinity, and it drops several useful items, including 1 or 2 magic ones. After half an hour of killing you are overloaded with magic goodies. Now I've always claimed that loot is important, but that is a bit too much of a good thing. Especially since the inventory and equipping interface is a bit chaotic and fiddly, sorting out what to use isn't easy. Buying AC included 1 month of free play, as usual, but I won't pay any longer than that. I am probably missing the major selling point of AC, allegiances, a much better guild structure than most games. But I only met 1 other player in my whole play session, even the town was deserted, and there was a message stating that there were only 400 players on the server. I'm happy that I finally played it, just for the sake of not being ignorant, but I obviously missed Asherons Call heyday.

So the winner is ... A Tale in the Desert II. With some interuptions, mostly due to the server being brought down (it's still beta), I played ATITD2 nearly all weekend long. It is interesting to play this from the start, my previous ATITD experience was already higher up the communal tech tree. What ATITD has in abudance are goals, you always know what you are working on. And because nearly all goals have multiple requirements, the game is varied enough, as practically each resource is collected and processed differently. In spite of the community being small (breaking an all time record of over 700 simultaneous players this weekend), it is very close and friendly.

The really awe-inspiring feature of A Tale in the Desert is (and always has been), how close the developers are to the players. ATITD is the brain child of Andrew "Pharaoh" Tepper (also called "Teppy"), and he is present in the game often. Look at the following exchange which happened this weekend: Pharaoh asks on the system channel to send him /tells where we players see major bottlenecks and problems. I send him a /tell that leather is in short supply everywhere (leather comes from sheep and camels, of which a fixed amount appear every game day, a number that doesn't scale with the number of players. Lots of players => bottleneck.) Other players tell him the same. Pharaoh says on the system channel that he will work on leather, and asks about details on whether sheep or camels are in shorter supply. Turns out it is both of them. He increases the number of sheeps spawning every day IMMEDIATELY. The fix for the camels (they work a bit more complicated) is introduced half a day later. Most of the changes occur without the server having to be stopped.

That level of customer support is really unheard of in other games. People reported bugs in EQ in 1999 which are still present in 2004. In most games you are lucky to get hold of a GM (game master, not a developer but a in-game customer service representative, often volunteer, always very low level in the company hierarchy), and the GM won't do more for you than getting you unstuck if you fell through a world geometry bug. Before another game doubles the supply of a resource, it would take months of developer internal discussions, with not much player input. Of course that is partially a question of game size, ATITD is a much smaller affair than EQ. But it is also a question of developer attitude. No other game feels as if it was developing FOR you, and WITH you, but A Tale in the Desert does.

A Tale in the Desert 2 open beta opened yesterday. Find out more on the official ATITD site, or download the client from Fileplanet. If you can imagine yourself playing a game without combat, but lots of other things to do, check it out.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:02 AM Permanent Link