A Tale in the Desert 2

More than a year ago I reviewed A Tale in the Desert 1 here. Yesterday, as subscriber of Fileplanet, I received an invite to the closed ATITD 2 beta. So I downloaded the client and jumped back into the peaceful world of Egypt.

The first important thing to explain is the meaning of the "2" in ATITD 2. Because this "2" is significantly different from the "2" in EQ2. Everquest is a game without an ending. But as I pointed out in my previous post, the graphics of old games are starting to look outdated after some time, and drive away customers. EQ subscription numbers have peaked some months ago, and are now declining. The developers were aware of that in advance, and created a completely new game, which they call Everquest 2. EQ2 will in many respects be similar to EQ1, but it is not just the same game with new graphics. All the quests, hunting spots, etc. will be different, many game mechanics will be different, and EQ2 will basically be a different game than EQ1. For some years to come you will have the choice of playing either EQ1 or EQ2, or even both if you have that much time.

ATITD is unusual in that it has an ending, and ATITD 1 is about to end now. There was an over-arching story line in which all players participated, and after 2 years the story ends and the game is over. Soon you can't play ATITD 1 any more, either you switch to ATITD 2, or you stop altogether. The "2" means that it is the "second telling" of the story. The story and game will be different, evolved, but not as different as EQ2 is from EQ1.

That is already noticeable when you first log in. The graphics are improved, with nicer looking avatars and landscape, but the graphics engine and user interface are basically the same. Many things still look exactly like they looked before, or just had their textures slightly improved. ATITD has always been about climbing up a tech tree, a bit as if you turned Civilization into a MMORPG. And at least the lower part of that tech tree is still exactly the same as in the first telling. But later there will be technologies that were not in the first part. And the "tests", ATITD's version of quests, also are a mix of the old and the new.

There have been some changes to the map, which look minor, but have major consequences. For example there are now far more trees than before. Wood being one of the basic building materials, that changes the game flow enormously. People used to teleport into the Sinai, just because there was a "forest" of 9 trees there. The forest is gone, and even if it were there, it wouldn't be such an attraction any more, wood is now easier to get. Another small change with big consequences is the placement of the schools and universities. They used to be evenly distributed over the map, so player settlements also were found everywhere. Now the schools and universities are more clustered, and you have to cross quite some space to move from one cluster to the next. That results in there now being "cities", "suburbs", and "rural" areas, evolving naturally.

The biggest change to basic game mechanics is that most production tools can't be placed into the wilderness any more. You first need to build a "compound", a house, and only in there you get the option to build those production tools. Right now all houses look the same, but there are some intrigueing looking "change blueprint" options, which look as if by providing the material you can change the look of your house. In any case you now see lots of houses, especially in the "city centers" (the middle of the school/university clusters), and that makes the world look a lot different than before. You can turn the walls of any house off, fortunately, so your own house wall doesn't get into the way when you are working on the production tools.

I have only played ATITD for a few hours up to now, so there are more changes which I haven't seen yet. It seems there are now "chariots" going from one city to another, for easier travel. But the old travel system, where you can have several teleportation points earned by learning several levels of the navigation skill, still exists as well.

What hasn't changed is ATITD is the game which feels most like "working". For example I would like to learn the first level of navigation. For that I need to collect 1,000 thorns, which at 5 thorns per plant per minute means picking 200 yucca plants (attention old ATITD players: the old purple thorn bushes have been replaced by new yellow-green yucca plants). And before I can do that, I need to make 200 bricks and 100 boards to make the chest in my house big enough to hold the thorns. 200 bricks means picking 66 grass at 1 grass per picking, the mud and sand for them I can get all in one command, and laying out 6 bricks to dry 33 times. 100 boards means cutting 100 wood, 20 times 5 per tree, and clicking on the wood plane 100 times to cut them into boards, not to mention replacing the stone blade of it several times. As you can see, I have my work for the next play session cut out for me.

Of course this "work" is not principally different than slaying 1,000 orcs to get up a level in a classical MMORPG. You could even say it is a lot more varied, as different raw materials are gathered in different fashions, and different advanced materials have different "mini-games" to produce them. But one can see how many people would prefer killing 1,000 orcs.

ATITD (1 as well as 2) is a very social game, with a lot of player interaction. Move a bit up the tech tree, and the amount of work to build a production tool goes up into regions where co-operation seems a much better choice. Especially at certain choke points of the tech tree: For example jugs of water are very important and needed in large quantities, but to make them you need a pottery wheel, and to make the pottery wheel you need a stone saw to produce the flywheel part of it. The stone saw is very hard to get to all on your own, but once you built it, you are not going to use it all that often, as having something like 12 pottery wheels is largely sufficient. So players group together in guilds, and the whole guild just needs one single stone saw. Further up the tech trees are improved production tools, like a carpentry shop, making 50 boards in one go, instead of 1 like the wood plane. But those too are expensive to build, and doing it in a guild and not alone makes a lot of sense.

Beyond guilds, the whole community is working together on bigger tech advancements. Some technologies are learned not by an individual paying a fee of resources at a school, but by many people donating large amounts of resources to an university. Once the required amount of resources is donated, the university is giving out the skill to everybody who passes for free, and the whole server is advancing.

On the other hand, for a game without combat, ATITD has a mean form of PvP. Things you do often affect other players in negative ways. Build a mine, and it pollutes the environment, making somebody elses sheep sick and his flax wither. Tests often pit you into direct competition with other people, for example forcing you to "build the highest obelisk in the region", an ever-increasing requirement that makes you curse the other players who came before you. Some resources are rare, and you might find the whole vein of that rare metal you need blocked by other peoples mines. Camels are distributed in some form of hidden "auction", going to the person in the region who left the most straw in his stable. And so on, lots of sources for conflict. And that is deliberate. The whole game is about a society having both positive and negative interactions, and how they are dealing with it, with the ultimate target of reaching Utopia. Which is a nice and interesting idea, but people not being all that selfless naturally, there is some pain involved playing this.

I like ATITD, and am happy to play it again for a while. This is the sort of tradeskill system I wish some other MMORPG had. But I am not an Utopist, and know that me and most other people are easier motivated by individual achievement than by collective one. We are already living in Real Life ® in a peaceful world where many of us are doing work that is just a small cog in a large machine. For my games I prefer something different to that. But of course even mundane simulation games like The Sims have a big following, just the online version was a flop. So ATITD 2 is at least worth checking out if you are looking for something completely different. ATITD does what is does well enough, I just wish they also had levels and monsters and the other classical MMORPG stuff.

ATITD has a fine tradition of giving away the client for free, and having a free trial period. I assume that the same will be true for ATITD 2 once the beta is finished. So trying out if there is a peaceful side in you is not a financial risk, well worth trying.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:26 AM Permanent Link