This is an extremely confusing game.

Quizzical

The game starts you off in a zone completely by yourself, presumably as some sort of tutorial.  There is one monster to kill.  Kill it, and it tells you to go to the hub world.  But it doesn't say how.  Running around exploring the world didn't turn up any hub world, though I did die when I fell off a cliff.  Clicking through every single menu I could find didn't find anything that worked.  Finally pressing every single key on the keyboard until one randomly warped me to the hub world is what it wanted.

What the game really needs is a tutorial.  Well, there is kind of a tutorial, the "Golden Thread".  The problem is that it's far too terse.  Most tasks give you about three words or so of what you're supposed to do, with no details about how to do it.  Some tasks are obvious enough.  Others require clicking on random things and clicking through random menus until you happen to find by chance what it wanted you to look for.

For example, "Advanced Combat 1" means "use your second skill", something you've likely done already before getting to that step.  "Advanced Combat 2" means "use your third skill".  But "Advanced Combat 3" does not mean "use your fourth skill"; it wants you to dodge.  The task to use your fourth skill is "Ultimate Power".

It's also a strange sort of multiplayer.  There are a lot of other players around.  But I didn't see much interaction between players.  In about two hours, I saw one chat message total, an advertisement for something or other on Twitch.  I haven't seen a game with so little chatter from so many players since Wizard 101.  So there are players around, but I'm not sure if it's possible to ask for help--or if anyone would see a message and reply.

The lack of communication, both from the game itself and from other players, is so bizarre as to make me wonder if it's all buggy, as opposed to unfathomably bad design.  I'm usually not one to give up on a game so quickly if it makes a bad initial impression (if I were, I'd never have gotten off of the starting world), but this game is really pushing it.

Quizzical

I gave it another go today, and I'm about ready to give up.  Between the "Golden Thread" tutorial (which tells you what to do but not how) and the "How to Play" section (which tells you some of the default controls and ignores if you changed them), there are fewer than 300 words of in-game text explaining how to play the game.  And yes, I counted, and checked the wiki to find the rest of the Golden Thread quest line.  The "Game Guide" on the site has perhaps a couple thousand words or so, but it reads like marketing blurbs for the side of a game box, not an explanation of what to do and how.  For comparison, the terms of use agreement has about 23K words.

It seems like it could be a cool game if you're into building and level-crafting and don't have the programming skills to use far more capable tools.  But other than that, it looks like there's not much to see.  Dungeons get repetitive awfully fast, and combat seems to be mostly a matter of hack away until either the mob dies or you do, and use a flask when you need it.  Crafting is as simple as click a button and wait a couple seconds.  Lasermancy for mining is an interesting touch, but hardly enough to carry a game on its own if you're not into world building.

I've warped back to hub worlds numerous times, likely going to different hub worlds.  But it's always the same:  lots of players milling around, often moving so that they don't look AFK, but eerie silence with no random chatter.

I get the feeling that the game could have some cool stuff that I completely missed.  But if Trion is keeping it secret, that's on them, and it's not my job to go digging for features that probably aren't there.  I think I more or less understood most of the stuff I tried.  In the "Golden Thread" line, I'm stuck on the "Join a Club" step.  I've gone to club worlds, but that's apparently not what it wants.  The in-game Clubs menu just says to drag and drop here, but doesn't say what to drag and drop or what it will do.

goboygo

Its free, people like free, demand it actually. Free makes for unfulllfilling feature depleted games unless you make it not free, in which case you have to pay far more than you should if everyone just bought quality games in the first place. And paying more than you should doesn't fix bad games it just makes you a little poorer.  Quality games you pay for first give you cool things like, working tutorials!  Keybindings that stick!  You know things like that, things I guess people think are overrated and don't want to have to pay for.

So they ask for free........and so it continues.

Quizzical

goboygo said:

Keybindings that stick!

That's another thing I noticed.  It keeps unmapping my second skill so that I have to go recreate the keybind for it.

I tried entering trade chat, and it doesn't seem to work.  There's an option to enable it, so I select the option, close the menu, reopen the menu, and the trade chat option is unselected again.

Quizzical

So I tried "/join trade" in hopes of finding a chat channel with actual chat in it.  Nada.

What's strange is that there is intermittently a semi-transparent rectangular box toward the bottom left corner of the screen in roughly the position that one might expect a chat box to be.  But there's never any text in it; only blue horizontal stripes, with two different shades of blue.  The stripes sometimes move around, and sometimes the box disappears entirely only to reappear later.  But nothing that looks like text ever appears there.

So far, I've basically been treating it like a single-player game.  Which, without any way to communicate with other players, it pretty much is.

You say it's a throw-back to the old days.  And if you mean the days of cartridges that had little to no text because, with only 64 KB or so for your entire game, there just wasn't space, it kind of is.  Though we didn't have anything remotely similar to 3D graphics back then, unless you count simple lines like in Battlezone.  But that's not a meaningful limitation anymore.

I'm not asking for a completely on-rails theme park.  I can appreciate open-ended.  I spent a whole lot of time in Uncharted Waters Online, A Tale in the Desert, and Puzzle Pirates.  But would it really kill Trion to have someone take a day to write a few thousand words explaining what the options are, and make that available in-game when it's relevant?

Quizzical

Upon further review, it looks like it's a reproducible bug.

If the game window gets larger than about 3900 pixels in the horizontal direction or 2200 in the vertical, a bunch of text vanishes. It's not just the chat box, but most of the Golden Thread text, numbers to indicate how many of something is in a stack, and a number of other things. And the text that vanishes won't come back until you restart the game. So if you load the game at a high resolution and change it to a lower resolution, a bunch of text is missing. Restart the game at a lower resolution and the text appears. Change to a high resolution and the text vanishes, and back to the lower resolution and it stays gone until you restart.

I thought the resolution cap might be 3840x2160 ("4K"), but it can definitely handle more than 3840 horizontal pixels. The cap seems like it's around 3900, and probably somewhere shy of 4000. The vertical pixel cap might be 2160 exactly, or it might not, but it's close to that.

That a lot of other text was also missing is part of why it was so confusing.  Apparently the "Golden Thread" quests aren't supposed to just give you a three word title, but also a 20 or so word description.  But the description was buggy and not showing.  Having the title and also the description is massively less confusing than the title alone.  Imagine trying to do quests in any MMORPG from just the title with no quest text explaining what you're supposed to do.  That's basically what was happening.