I played ATITD before, so I'm loosely familiar with it, but I wanted to play it a bit more and try out some of the mechanics. But mein gott it's pissing me the hell off.
WoW did a lot of things right. Previous MMOs were hard-core, and one of the ways that they were so is that you either knew how to play already or you weren't welcome. You have to figure out everything on your own. WoW just tells you the answer most of the time. I had to find some tar in Egypt (much easier name than ATITD). OK, fine, I have to find it on my own. But the game didn't even give me any hints. What's it look like? Can you give me a rough idea of where to look? In old-school MMOs, you're just supposed to wander around until you figure it out on your own.
Some people love that, but those people are in the minority. I used to think I liked that mechanic, but I GREW UP, DAMMIT. The game isn't about figuring out where the fuck they hid the tar, it's about choices and exploration. "What the fuck is tar and where do I find it?" isn't exploration; it's confusion.
Finding cool stuff is exploration, like waterfalls or hidden buildings or new zones or statues or ruins or whatever. Fog of War in the minimap helps that -- tell me where I haven't been. A "here's everything" minimap means that you don't "discover" the Universities in Egypt. (There's no mechanic in the game to tell you, anyway.)
- Movement is just lame. Click-to-move means when I'm trying to move I instead sometimes click on objects. And then I want to punch something.
- You can't move with keys AND have a chat window open.
- You can't click in scrollbar elevators to move chat by a page.
- The camera SUCKS. You can't control pitch independent of zoom.
- The camera SUCKS. You have to move the mouse to the edge of the window to yaw the camera.
- You start the game far away from anything interesting.
- To do ANYTHING requires driving through a bunch of menus.
- The intro quest has like 30 steps. WTF? That's not a gentle introduction. It's a "gentler" introduction.
- When you try running down a slope that's too steep, you get a pop-up dialog that you need to dismiss before continuing. And since you click to move, chances are you're going to get that dialog a lot. This is exactly the sort of thing the player should be left to figure out on their own -- STEEP SLOPE = BAD. They hide the tar but you give us an idiot dialog for steep slopes? Please.
- You can't split windows that start off stacked.
- Recipes are hidden. What's it take to build a chest? Try building a chest! If you don't have the ingredients, it will tell you. If you do have the ingredients, it won't tell you, it'll just dump you in the construction interface.
- Making boards? Oh. My. God. You have to stand there and hit 'p' 200 times to make 200 boards, a common ingredient in low-level stuff. At 2 seconds per board, that's 400 seconds, about 6 minutes of staring and hitting a key... That isn't a game, it's work.
- I could go on, but really, kill me now.
WoW lets you open a bunch of chat windows for example; here, you can only look at one of the System, Main, local, and Whisper windows at a time. Oh, and since you can't use the keyboard to move if you have the chat window open, either you use the lame camera and mouse-click-to-move (which makes me want to punch things) or you keep chat closed just so you can move around easily. THIS GAME IS HARD TO PLAY. Not hard as in gameplay; just telling the game what I want to do (like, "move over there") is a challenge. The UI is the challenge.
WoW does recipes very well. One window per tradeskill. The top half is all the recipes you know, the bottom half is (1) a listing of the ingredients you need, (2) a display that tells you how much of each of those ingredients you already have, so you can tell at a glance what you need, and (3) a display of what the hell the thing you're creating is. What's the difference between a Chest and a Large Chest? Build them and find out! ATITD will be damned if it's gonna help you out! If you don't have two monitors (with the second one opened to someone else's website), then you just get the "challenge" of figuring out what the fuck is going on.
Small steps and frequent rewards = happy player base. The designers don't seem particularly interested in that kinda stuff; the game had an archaic interface when it first came out, and it's only barely improved.
If you're doing one action a bunch, you can make a floating window with that button in it, but ... bleh. Figuring out where commands are hidden is bad gameplay. Mechanics like "what do you get when you cross these two grape strains, and what does that do to wine?" are great. Brilliant. Exactly what I want. Hide that stuff, let me figure it out, I'll love you for it. BUT DONT HIDE THE DAMN "plant vine" BUTTON. Dumbass.
One of the main mechanics in the game is running around. Travel time isn't fun. It's shouldn't be a barrier to play. Travel time keeps you from doing everything without meeting other people. Here, it's a lame attempt to extend the time it takes to get anything done. WoW requires some travel sometimes, but a play session isn't 90% running or waiting. A lot of the 'trick' to ATITD is figuring out how to use your time while you wait for some lame timer to expire. You can't just do what you want.
Take gathering wood. It's a grind. Click on a tree, run to the next tree, cycle, repeat, repeat, repeat, swear, log out, uninstall... It doesn't take any longer to gather stuff than it does in WoW; in fact, I think it takes less time. Hmm. I tolerate Herbing in WoW; but that's profitable. Skilling up and leveling up shouldn't be a grind. If I want to grind for extra cash, that's one thing. But grinding for basic mats is excessive.
My beef here is how boring the activity is. Herbing is ... mostly boring. I tolerate it because ... I want something special? I know I'm doing it for the cash? I guess the point really is that it should be better in WoW; that herbing is lame. Another major point is that I've already bought into the rest of WoW; ATITD feels like nothing but grinding. Gather wood (boring), make boards (boring), run to the university (boring, and frustrating because of the camera), run back, go gather more slate because the wood plane broke, grind away for another 20 minutes... There's no fun anywhere there.
Fun would be trying out crossbreading wines, or flax, or beetles.
ATITD is not quite "death is fun!" but it's damn close. It really really doesn't want me to play it.
I'm gonna play my 24 free hours and see what I can learn from that, and then it gets erased. FUCK THIS GAME. It's so sad, the economy and tradeskills are really deep and complex and interesting and really appealing to mechanics-explorers like me...
Then again, I could just read the webpages. I'd learn more, and I wouldn't be so bored. What I've been doing is reading the web (and working on this blog) on one computer, while I mindlessly run around or do whatever on the other machine. Downtime is time to socialize, but ... meh? The whole game is downtime. I reckon the stuff that I'm hoping is fun (crossbreeding, etc) is going to be just as boring.
And I need to be like level 12 anyway. Each "level" is roughly one of these grind-quests. So, just to get to what I want to look at is going to take that much grinding.
I'm torn. I think I'm going to play out the 24 hours because (1) it's free, and (2) I'll be able to do it while reading and typing on my second computer.
So, should you check it out? That depends on your grind-tolerance, and whether you've got a monitor big enough to both play the game and do something useful at the same time. Two machines helps a lot, because I can leave the game window focused and just mash the 'p' key every two or three seconds without having to worry about window focus. So, if you've got a similar setup, give it a try.
I really recommend learning about the game because the tradeskill stuff is great.
The rest... /sigh.
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