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?

It is here now

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?

Yeah, not at all borrowed from Azeroth

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.

He’s a warrior

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.

Can you even tell what head size I chose?

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.

Welcome to the photo studio

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.

This isn’t all that interesting, honestly

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.

Void Fiend I shall end you!

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.

NPCs or the most boring set of name choices ever to be in a single group… I mean, “Janet?”

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.

Look, I am tanking a dragon two minutes into playing!

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.

Kensington Expert Mouse… old picture, but I have the same mouse still

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