Gamescom 2024 in Cologne, Germany, is about to begin with Geoff Keighley’s Opening Night Live spectacle, a two-hour parade of trailers, advertisements, and ideally, new game announcements that kick off the show and set the stage for the event… oh yeah, and give those of us back home some distraction. Thanks to public hints and […]

I will admit that you really have to be in the right mood to take on a new MMORPG… Tarisland is an MMORPG, isn’t it?  It is just Amazon Games that is trying to distance itself from whatever stigma they have made up in their minds for that term, right?

Anyway, mood and mindset… you have be ready, to have it within you to go through all the opening stages and the slow progression and the tutorial moments and whatever else is between you and playing the damn game on your own terms.

And it would be fair to ask whether I was in a receptive state of mine, willing and able to go through the pedestrian opening stages that tend to characterize any MMORPG.  There is a dichotomy in play at the start of any such game, where the first, say, 20 levels or so, can be the best part of the game… the way the first 100 moves can be the best part of a Civilization game… or where those early levels can be bothersome, boring drag that makes you want to log off and do something else.

I had earlier this week walked away from the EverQuest II Anashti Sul Origins Server because I simply could not stomach the idea of going through those first 20 levels yet again.

But there was also nearly 20 years of history and maybe 50 characters of weight behind that choice.  So maybe it wasn’t a fair assessment as to my ability to jump into a new game based on that.

So I downloaded Tarisland yesterday morning and spent a bit of time with it while I ate my lunch, and I wasn’t very many bites into that before I decided I hated the game.

It wasn’t the cut scenes, though I did think that the gunship in it looks suspiciously like a rip-off of WoW… was it going to be a WoW clone after all?

It wasn’t the annoying way you had to go through a ten second flourish every time you wanted to look at a different class in the character creation tool.

I mean, seriously, did nobody think that maybe a tool tip or a title or something that would just tell you what each of the classes are on the left hand side of the screen would be a reasonable idea?  Instead you have to click on each one and go through their demo reel before you can even see what they are.

But you only have to do that for a bit, not constantly, so I could get past that.

I wasn’t bothered by the art style, which felt more like what the Daybreak team was trying to achieve with EverQuest Next than WoW’s particular flavor of stylized art, but whatever.  I am good with it.

The rather minimal of character customization options and the rather minimal effect they have on your look… are kind of par for the course for titles of Asian origin.  The most noticeable thing you can change is your hair style, and really only the color of your hair in that set of options has any effect on how you look at even a slight distance.

The slider for height felt like deciding if you want to be 5′ 9″ or 5′ 11″ for range of options, while the size of your head… there is a slider for the size of your head… basically changed your hat size in a range of maybe five notches… maybe size 57 to 62 in scale.

But that was fine.  I’ve literally seen so much worse that I couldn’t care about it save to note it in passing.

I did find the fact that there are still some sex locked classes… ever the hallmark of Asian MMOs… to be a bit irksome, but I was going to make a paladin and could be either sex with that class.  Paladins are bi-sexual… or ambi-sexual… or something.

And, I will admit, the lack of support for screenshots was annoying.  There is an option in the menu to go to a photo mode where you can take posed pictures of your character.

There are bunch of options within that UI and you can set yourself with or without the UI… though why it would take a picture with the UI is beyond me.  At least I think that is why there is the option to hide the photo UI, to keep it from being in the picture… though trying is, you get no UI either way… so why?

Once you take the picture it saves it away for you and I had to dig around to find where it chose to secret these shots.  They end up in the Pictures directory on Windows, which I guess makes sense, but I thought of half a dozen other places they could be… all based on how OTHER games store pictures… before I ended up there.  And you end up with a bland post card shot that I guess you’re supposed to post to social media or something.

That feels like a lot of work for very little value.  So to get the few screenshots shown here I had to mash the Print Screen button, then tab out and paste the clipboard into Paint.net.  I could have gotten FRAPs setup to take screen shots, or the nVidia overlay thingy, but I was a few minutes into the game and didn’t want to break stride to find out if I remembered how to do either.

Oh, but I did get my first name choice.  I wonder if that speaks to the popularity of the game on the North American server?

There were other little annoyances as well, things that felt like they shouldn’t have been a problem for any company that had ever shipped an MMO before, but nothing game breaking.

On the good side, they do get you right into the action.  Once you get past the cut-scenes when you launch the game… and you have to see them EVERY TIME you launch the game… you are doing something fun, like killing things.

The combat is very ability oriented and reminds me, at first glance, more of a Guild Wars 2 style of combat that WoW, with a limited set of combat skills available, though I haven’t played GW2 in years so don’t take offense if you disagree strongly with that characterization.

They even throw you into a group right away to go through a mini-boss fight… though I suspect those are all NPCs in my group as opposed to actual people.

And you take that group and fight a dragon and have to go through some simple boss fight mechanics that get shouted at you… Catherine gets on you about going here or avoiding that, though at least never quite gets to “more DOTS” level of raid boss… and things happen.

Things do fall off a bit after that as you get into the more normal introduction tour of the game, but at least it gives you a taste of what could be achieved.

Summing up so far:  Some minor annoyances and a modestly above average intro.

So what is the issue?  Why “hate” in the title of the post.

Let’s talk about movement controls.

I am old and set in my ways, so for a classic, over the shoulder, fantasy MMORPG I am good with two movement control schemes, both based on the WASD keys.

The first is the way that WoW and EverQuest and frankly most western title in the genre handle it, which is A rotates you left, D rotates you right, and if the game decides you need to strafe left or right, you probably use the Q and E keys for that.  Boring but reliable.

Sure, you can also mouse turn using the right mouse button on your mouse… I did try not to use the word mouse three times in that, but failed… and some people will get very upset if you do not do this in certain circumstances… but it isn’t the only way you can turn.

The other method is the first person shooter way of life, where the cursor controls where you face when moving and the WASD keys make you move, with A and D allowing you to strafe left and right.

This is what Valheim uses, along with every first person shooter I can recall off hand, mostly because mouse aim is a requirement.

I prefer the first, but can adapt to the second at need with a short transition.

What I cannot abide is how Tarisland has decided to setup their movement controls, which is the same way that V Rising chose to do it, where it is mostly the FPS model, but you need to hold down the right mouse button to engage directional control.  And I get why you might want to consider this in a title where you might need the cursor free to do other things.

Actually no, no I do not.  I do not get why somebody would chose this control model as it seems inferior to me that the previous two methods I outlined.  On find out this is the way the game played I immediately went into the settings in the hopes I could remedy this… but the settings options are so minimal as to be laughable.  And there was certainly nothing in there to deal with the movement controls… probably a side effect of the game being on mobile as well as PC.  So I was cut off.

I have taken this tack before and had somebody get quite annoyed with me when I said this was why I immediately stopped playing V Rising.  Their annoyance in that moment came from the fact that I could not immediately articulate why “just holding down the right mouse button” was a problem for me.

But I can do so here.  The reason is that I don’t use a mouse on my home machine, I use a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball.

And with the trackball and button configuration, holding down the right mouse button any time I want to move… which would be pretty much constantly in any combat if the intro demo is to be believed… is pretty much a non-starter as it probably requires more pinky finger endurance than I posses that being my go-to right mouse click finger.

So, easy on a normal mouse, kind of tough, or at least annoying, on my trackball.

And I am committed to that trackball.  I have been using variations of that same heavy ball model trackball since the late 1980s.  I am so committed that I have on the bookshelf behind me another one, still new in its box, just in case the current one fails and I find out that whoever owns the brand these days… Logitech owned it last I checked… has discontinued it.  I am not letting things go down the way they did with that G15 keyboard in the picture above.  No way!

Now, I am not completely unreasonable on this.  If our group decided that Tarisland was really the next game we wanted to play, I would probably find a way to deal with the issue.  But that seems unlikely to occur and for a free MMO that I do not have any real investment in beyond the 25GB download.  It is easier to let it go that try to get invested with that particular barrier in place.

But it does answer the one question about Tarisland that I have been harping on since it was announced, which is whether or not it was really the blatant and obvious WoW clone that some in the gaming press made it out to be long before they ever cast an eye on the actual game.

The answer to that, in my book, is “no.”  If a game is going to adopt a different set of movement controls, then it isn’t doing a very good job of being a clone.

That, however, is me getting into details.  I could point out the combat skills and the hot bar arrangement and the character models and probably many more things that would disqualify it from that appellation in the eye of a discerning fan of the genre.

But if you want to just say anything with a stylized art style, over the shoulder point of view, quests, and tab targeting combat is a WoW clone, then there are a lot of those to be found beyond Tarisland.

A philosophical question more than a literal one I suppose.

So Tarisland goes back on the shelf.  The headline of this post is somewhat hyperbolic.  My reaction to Tarisland doesn’t rise to anywhere near the level of hate.  It just has a control scheme I tend to avoid because I find it awkward to use.  In that dragon fight, for example, where, as a melee class, I was deep in the fight, I was unable to tell at times if I was even facing the mob because the camera and movement inputs do not respond the way I expect.

Maybe I’ll try it on the iPad.  Maybe it will be the MMO that I actually enjoy on a mobile device.  There are a few posts over on r/mmorpg saying it is more a mobile title ported to PC than the other way around.  Who knows.

Related:

• MMO Fallout – MMOments From Taris Land: I’m Already Max Level
• MMO Fallout – Tarisland’s Limited Reindeer Draws Anger
• Inventory Full – What A Difference A Year Makes… Or Doesn’t
• Massively OP – Tarisland thanks players for 5M pre-registrations with a free sparkle pony

We are officially in summer, with the summer solstice having passed just yesterday.  Happy Midsommar to all who celebrate.  May your sacrifices protect you and bring a bountiful harvest once more.

I was a bit surprised that the Steam Summer Sale did not kick off yesterday.  Steam has a pretty solid track record of landing summer and winter sales on the first day of each season.  But this year it won’t start until the 27th. [Addendum: Though if I had looked back to 2023, I would have seen it didn’t start until the 29th, so just another issue in my brain.]

So no post about that today, as I had sort of planned.  Instead, some things are launching or announcing dates for launch.  Time for a pass through that I guess!

• Tarisland Launches

Tarisland goes live today, doesn’t it?  Technically it is going live world-wide and will have launched everywhere on the list by the time this post gets published.  At 11am eastern time it was supposed to go live here in North America, the last of its launch regions after Asia, Europe, and South America.

Derided repeatedly as a WoW-clone in a world where it is tough to be an MMORPG without that comparison, it is available on PC, Android, and iOS as a free to play title.

I have said several times that I wanted to give it a try, if only to see if all this WoW-clone talk had any merit.  But I have I downloaded it yet?  I have not.  Maybe it will strike my fancy this weekend.

Anyway, there is a launch announcement with details on how to join in on your platform of choice.  They have even partnered with an emulator to try and make the game playable on MacOS.  You need an M-series Mac, no Intel models need apply, and there are hoops to jump through, but you could make it happen if you were dying to play.

Finally, looking at that logo, is it Tasisland or Taris Land?

Meh, I’m not going to worry about it.

• Throne & Liberty Launch Date

Amazon Games, fresh off their good times trying to pretend New World isn’t an MMORPG, has announced the launch date for their next venture, Throne & Liberty, which promises to bring online RPG gameplay into a new era.

Also it is multiplayer.  And a lot of people will be able to play together.  I mean, they literally use the word “massive” later on in the text to describe the PvP and PvPvE experience.  It is almost like it is… I don’t know, another MMORPG?

Amazon, why won’t you say that?  They have literally banished the term from their web site.  They make zero MMORPGs if you believe what they say.

Anyway, a title that I nearly put on the “won’t ship in 2024” list for my new year’s predictions… seriously, it was on there, then I realized I had one too many for the point count, so I removed it, will in fact ship in 2024, landing on September 17th.

So I dodged that bullet.  That and the whole refusal by Amazon to use the term “MMORPG” are the key takeaways from this bullet point.

• Valheim Board Game

Valheim has apparently hit the level of success where somebody felt they needed to make a board game out of the experience.

This will be a crowdfunding campaign and run by another company, which is probably good because Iron Gate has like three devs and they still have a biome to finish some time this decade.   The campaign will be run on Game Found, an off-brand Kickstarter clone for board games which you can find here.

There is a teaser video, but I am not going to bother to embed it because it is 17 seconds and tells you less than I’ve already written.  If you are interested you’ll have to go sign up at Game Found to get alerts as to when the campaign will go live… as they haven’t bothered to tell us yet.

• EVE Online Paragon Store for SKINs

The next stage of the Equinox expansion hit yesterday, which included the launch of the Paragon store in game, which allows you to take those rather pricey SKINs you can make with the new SKINR utility and list them on the market.

And, of course, it is a mess.  The store front is there and you can do some sorting, but as an online shopping experience it rates ahead of the Pokemon Go in-game cosmetic store, but only just barely, and Niantic at least has the poor excuse of having to work within phone sized devices.

Anyway, you can find it in game… not easily, but you’ll get there if you persist… and read the CCP optimistic take on it here.  Or you can go over to r/eve and see what players think.  It isn’t pretty.

• EVE Vanguard Solstice

CCP’s decades spanning desire to make a successful first person shooter game despite all the signs indicating it is a bad idea carries on with a new round of EVE Vanguard testing which starts… wait, it started yesterday, didn’t it?  Yes.

The play test… because it is still in alpha so all two dozen fans will get angry and remind you of this should you criticize any aspect of it… features a second map, weapon SKINs, and… um… well, there is still just one gun, but you can now change its stats with chip sets you can find in game.

The play test runs to July 1st, so there is plenty of time to join in.  You’ll need to download it in the EVE Online launcher because CCP is determined to handcuff this potential corpse to its one viable game.  And, of course, they are offering SKINs to people who join in… which feels kind of odd now that they have blown up the SKIN market with SKINR, but whatever.  That is the bribe they have to offer.

You can read more about it here.

• Hearthstone Perils in Paradise

Finally, over at Blizzard they are cranking out yet another Hearthstone expansion.  It isn’t exactly a “month with a vowel in it” level of phenomena, but they do seem to get two or three out every year.

Maybe the WoW team could learn something from them.

Or maybe not, as Hearthstone goes where it pleases with the lore, with the new expansion being called Perils in Paradise, featuring a lot of perhaps unlikely Azeroth activities on the splash screen.

Anyway, among the features of the expansion are tourist cards that act as a conduit to bring in cards unrelated to your class in order to spice up your deck.  Blizz is also introducing catch-up packs, which I think was mentioned back at BlizzCon where I made some joke about ketchup packs… wait, here is the joke… was it worth it?

Anyway, those are here now.  The whole thing launches on July 23rd and you can read more about it here.

That is what I’ve got for Friday.  Did I miss anything?

As a long-time fan of MMORPGs, I was happy to give Tarisland a try. Even better, it’s free, and codes give you the option to earn extra goodies. It all adds to my experience as a mage, destroying groups of enemies with frost or fire, depending on which specialization I feel like having at the time.

Tarisland features quite a few resources that you need for different upgrades and aspects. From crafting and collecting materials to upgrading your Inscribed Stone, you need resources to do it. Plus, resources like Vigor take a long time to replenish. If you feel like exploring another fantasy world full of stories, look at our list of Genshin Impact codes for even more free goodness!

The post Tarisland Codes (June 2024) appeared first on GameSkinny.

New MMORPGs are rare these days. To a lot of people, Tarisland may be a pleasant surprise for those looking for a modern, competent MMORPG. Luckily, we’re here to help you get started with 10 tips for Tarisland.

Best Beginner Tips for Tarisland

Despite just launching, and being an MMO designed for both mobile and PC, Tarisland is surprisingly fully featured. In fact, the game has enough going on that it can be a bit overwhelming. We’re hoping the tips below will help with that!

Summer is Coming!

I live in California, so I don’t worry too much about winter as even when it is bad… storms and rain… that is generally good for us.  Summer though… it is going to be a hot one.  It was already up in the 90s this week and the first official day of summer, June 20th, hasn’t even arrived yet.

On the good news front, we got a heat pump central forced air system for the house, so after 17 years in our place we will have air conditioning in the summer.  We’ll be getting solar installed at last early next month so we’ll have the electricity to drive the heat pump which, while it is energy efficient, still draws power.

But that is neither here nor there for this post.  I wanted to list out some things coming up in June.  I know, isn’t that what the “Coming Up” section of my month in review post is for?  Sure, but I forgot some things, found out about some new things, and I’ll put pictures and links in this post.  So let’s go!

• WoW: The War Within Beta – June 5th

Yeah, that was Wednesday, but you’re not too late if you want to participate.  There is a whole page dedicated to the beta, what content will be available, and how to join here.

The War Within is, of course, the next expansion due later this year for retail WoW.  Being somewhat divorced from retail since early in Shadowlands, I have some mild interest in the expansion, but going to retail these days is like going to a foreign country… they do all the same stuff as us… or classic… but it is all slightly different and awkward for a naive traveler like myself.  But I’ve been over all of that already, haven’t I?

But a beta… I haven’t done a retail WoW beta since Cataclysm, and we saw how that went.

• Valheim on MacOS – June 10th

2021’s huge indy survival success, Valheim, will be making the move to MacOS as the developers look for new markets to conquer.

I guess it will be on Steam.  Does Microsoft Games even support MacOS?  Maybe?  I don’t know.

But Iron Gate assures us that it will support cross-play, so if you setup a server for you PC buddies and a friend with a Mac shows up, they can play too.  I don’t have a Mac anymore… I mean, technically there are at least three MacOS computers in the house as I write this, but I do not actively work or play on the Mac these days.

• EVE Online Equinox Expansion – June 11th

I suppose if I am listing things out I need to include this.  The big old Equinox expansion is coming on Tuesday.

We shall see then who exactly is seizing control and whether or not null sec will be upended or if it is a great big nothing burger.  The ship SKINR should be neat, depending on how they plan to tax people to use it.

• EverQuest II Anashti Sul Origins Server – After June 13th

The jump back to a more authentic 2006 experience with the EverQuest II Anashti Sul Origins Server is slated to land this month.  The beta is slated to end on June 13th… so maybe the following Tuesday, the 18th?  Or maybe the 14th?  We’ll have to see.

It may seem a bit odd to go back 18 years for a 20th anniversary celebration, but the 2006 experience marks the settling point for the game, where it finally decided what it was for the moment and moved forward with content.  I wrote my views on this decision a while back, and plan to give it a peek when it shows up.

• Pax Dei Early Access – June 18th

Pax Dei is entering Early Access.  What does that mean?  All sorts of things I suppose and they have a whole post about it.

As a title it has been kind of on my watch list… I subscribe to their Discord server news channel so updates there show up in the blog’s Discord server… you can join if you like here… but given all the other stuff I have on my list for June, I feel like Pax Dei might not make the cut… especially since they want $40 to be a founder.  I already have $40 unplayed games in Steam, I am not sure I need another.

Also, there will be pwipes.  I don’t have time for that.  Call me when it ships.

• Steam Summer Sale – June 20th

The first day of summer, the summer solstice, and Steam is usually pretty good about kicking off the Steam Summer Sale on that day.

Will I buy anything?  That is always the question.  As noted above, I have my share of unplayed titles already, and I bought a bunch over the Winter Sale… and then ended up playing Valheim.

You can see your own Steam stats over at SteamDB.

Also, as it came out last week, when you cannot pass on your Steam titles.  You die, your account is dead… unless your give your kids your password and have family sharing on or something.  I am sure there is a work around, but it is just a reminder that nothing “digital” you buy is actually yours.  (Word is GoG.com might let you pass things on to your heirs, but there is paperwork involved.)

You want to have access to something it needs a physical… though even that isn’t a guarantee.  Sonus loves to brick their older sound systems and Spotify is bricking their car player later this year… though you might get a refund after a lot of outrage at their “fuck you” attitude about the whole thing… and all sorts of “smart” home devices end up getting bricked by Google or whoever buys the company then discontinues them.

Anyway, side rant there.  But for our new heat pump I got a dumb Honeywell thermostat.  No Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no other connectivity or ability to host Russian bot nets, and no way for Honeywell to shut it down without showing up at my doorstep.

• Tarisland Launch – June 21st

Tarisland, Tencent’s everybody-says-it-is-a-WoW-knockoff MMORPG title is set to go live on Windows, Android, and iOS on the second day of summer.

Tencent is promising all the things, diverse classes, challenging raids, a flexible talent system, excellent graphics, all in a free to play package with a cash shop that I am sure will have all the usual items in it.

Still, it is the first MMORPG from a big player to hit our market since maybe Lost Ark.

As with everything Tencent has a big post about joining in on the fun.  We’ll see if I can find the time for it come launch day.

• ICQ Shutting Down – June 26th

Children of the 90s… or maybe those of us who were young-ish adults of the 90s… hear me and weep.  What might have been the first instant messenger platform I ever used, ICQ, is going away on June 26th!

This was one of those one-two punch bits of news where I was saddened to find that ICQ was going away, but first I was surprised it was even still around.

What to say?  Way back in the day we used to use it to tell people to log in for a zone in TorilMUD.  I kept the login going well into the 2000s with Trillian.  Somewhere along the line I let it go, forgot the password, couldn’t remember my number, and basically moved on.

Still, it was quite a thing back in the day.  I told somebody I had a 5 digit ICQ number… but it might have been a 6 digit number.  This was like 25 years ago or more, right?  I had it before I had a Yahoo account, and they sent me a 25 year anniversary notice last year. (I noted the 24th anniversary message they sent me, but decided that didn’t have to be an EVERY year thing.)

Anyway, that was all I had for June.  Did I miss anything?  I mean, at least anything there is a chance I might play?  I am not really primed for things like the Elden Ring expansion of whatever is going on in FFXIV.