I must admit to mixed feelings about A Tale in the Desert at this point. It’s clearly a work of genius, on many levels, but I’m increasingly wondering if I’m good enough for it, which is an odd place to find myself.

One of the other Hemlock Beach residents came up with a quite astute theory, as we were chatting over the brick racks. ATitD attracts two sorts of people, the Gamers, and the Simers. I suppose we might identify those as Achievers and Socialisers, in Bartlespeak.

When the Telling starts, both come to have a go at it all. The Gamers, of course, hit the ground hard, and really go for it. To them, the tech tree and Principles, and Tests are the point if it all – a score perhaps; content. They’ll go for it, pursuing the goals set before them with zestful abandon, completing a lot of them, getting quite far. Many will ‘win’, whatever that means in each individual case. The Simers also start off on this great collaborative journey, making friends, communities, even a Nation, but at a more leisurely pace.

Much like the Hare and the Tortoise, the Gamers either get what they wanted out of the game quite early, or get bored and move on, while the Simers pace themselves, working together and indeed, thriving on the very Socialiser bias that the game has by design, and so stick at it for a much longer span than the Gamers, and at this late stage, are probably most of the remaining population of the game. The Gamers have mostly all moved on by now, leaving only buildings and monuments behind (Which I’m out there crowbaring for resources!)

I’m not sure where this leaves me, to be honest. I’m a Bartle Explorer, and I’m not sure where I fit in all the above. I’m quite fascinated by the tinkering of it all, but am not especially driven to tick off all the boxes, and at the same time, am not the sort of person who throws themselves into a whole new Community with a view to power, or indeed participation. The whole business with The Hole has put a bit of a dampener on things for me really, (Needs 12+ people working together to make further progress ‘as intended’) and I’ve given up on the ‘getting there under my own steam’ plan entirely. Wikis and spoilers ahoy!

So I’ve cracked open the stash of looted materials that I can’t actually gather myself yet, giving me a bit of a shortcut into further elements of gameplay, and I’m glad I did, because the Blacksmithing is nothing short of brilliant, and I’d have never seen it otherwise.

While in most games, making a blade is at most, a matter of finding some metal, clicking a menu and selecting ‘Make Longsword!’, in ATitD, things are characteristically much more involved, and in a somewhat abstract way, requires you to actually be good at shaping metal, after a fashion.

To do it, you need to make an Anvil, various hammers, and then scrounge up some metal. You place the metal on the anvil and select what to make. Then things get really complex:

Once a project is selected, the slab of metal shows up in world on the anvil. The above is the starting point for a Carpentry Blade, a useful object that helps automate the Board making process.

Then, you select a hammer, select how much force to put into the blow, and then click the metal itself. The metal slab is deformable, and will dent at the vertex where you clicked, by the amount set in the Force menu, like so:

Boink! A Force 9 hit on the nearest corner with a Ball Peen Hammer. The Ball Peen seems to cause a pointed dent, the Round Hammer a rounded dent, and the Shaping Mallet acts to flatten the area around the vertex clicked. There’s also a Tungsten Chisel I can’t make yet with the swag we’ve liberated so far… not sure what that does!

Clicky clicky clicky!

Any time while working, you can show the Goal Display, which changes the slab to show you what a perfectly beaten item should look like, and the object of the minigame is to hit the slab enough times, with the right force in the right places to make the working piece resemble the Goal Display as closely as possible. As you work, you can show the current Quality, which gives you a score, out of 9999 I think, based on how close you are to the Goal shape. It also shows you how many whacks you have left. Using Copper, you get 160 ‘hits’, before the slab can’t take anymore, and you have to finish. Presumably more durable metals can take more of a beating before you have to give up.

When that happens, (or before, if you choose Complete), your final Quality score determines the quality of the finished item, which impacts on how durable, or useful the item is. Real craftsmanship required!

Here’s how I did, on the left and what it should look like, on the right.

I thought that was quite close, but there is an incredible level of subtlety involved in the art, as this hamfisted attempt only scored an adequate 5530, out of 9999 or more. The blade is still useful in my Carpentry Shop of course, (3000+ for that) but is likely to break much sooner than a more finessed masterwork.

Other items to be made have different shapes to aim for, and different quantities of metal to make up the initial slab, including the elusive 9999+ Shovels, which when used with Super +40 Endurance Cooking foods, may possibly mean I can dig a hole all by myself!

The Hole remains important, because without the stones it provides, I can’t learn to mine my own metals, and am dependent on finding rickety equipment with no witnesses nearby, and without a renewable supply of metals, I can’t play this fascinating minigame for very much longer. But despite the necessity behind it, I find myself distracted by the sheer novelty of this extremely nifty and very elaborate take on the usual MMO staple of ‘Blacksmithing’, one in which real skill is a critical element, one that can be learned and perfected.

After a brief, but entirely unrelated sojourn in Belgium (Chocolates, Wine, Acres and Acres of First World War Cemeteries, Reasonable Weather), it’s back to it. Life on what I’ve loosely termed ‘Hemlock Beach’ seems to be getting a bit busy. There’s four of us beavering away on the Brick Racks now, with two of you folks having been sufficiently curious to work through a variety of clues scattered throughout this here blog, and the podcast, and stalked us sufficiently well to have set up Compounds in a spot which is almost impossible for a random new player to settle on by accident.

In the end, I threw up a modest guildhall, partly for the shared chat channel, but mostly, so that our new-found mini-village could all share out the score from The Great Collapsing Compound Caper.

As usual, it was one of those plans born out of idle curiosity, which all got out of hand very quickly. With the Salvage Techniques skill, the player gains the ability to, er, salvage materials whenever they tear something down. As well as your own stuff, this applies to any abandoned structures laying about the world. Under the Departed Persons Property Reclamation Act, this means anyone who has cancelled their account for longer than 14 days or so. Seems fair enough, and I’d gotten into the habit of checking the status of every building I pass on my wide ranging travels.

Then I stumble on this quite elaborate compound, with some fairly advanced looking equipment in it. Checking the status shows that these work items are fair game. I make a landmark on the spot for future reference, and move on my merry way. Several nights later, I mention this to our little gang of brigand-demolitionists and we pop over to pay it a visit, figuring that we might be able to salvage a few useful bits and pieces to make life a little easier in our own building projects; bricks, boards, that kind of thing, and anyway, I was curious to see how the skill worked in practice.

We set to, and started, er, reclaiming a few objects, each leaving a little pile of stuff for us to pick up. And then we reclaimed a few more. And a few more. I think the red mist must have taken over at this point, and it seems that our erstwhile benefactor must have been someone who had gotten pretty damned far into their own personal path to civilisation, as this stuff just kept coming… far more than we could all carry. The old magpie instinct kicked in, and eventually, it took me frantically building chests at a discrete drop-off location, while the others set to ferrying the spoils back and forth. Crazy, and things really did get out of hand when it transpired that the Huge Chests in the compound were also salvageable, and all contained a vast amount of resources of all manner of exotic types. Several hours of this later, and absolutely overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the haul, (7500 units of various stuff), we scarpered, that classic Gangster Heist Plot of the ‘Far Too Successful Score’ doing terrible things to my conscience…

Even now, I’m still in the process of ferrying the stash back to our new HQ. I don’t feel too bad about it all mind you, and thanks to the DPPRA, we did technically have the law on our side. Waste not want not, etc. It did seem a bit of a shame to be plundering some other person’s hard work so ruthlessly, but then again, by the look of the place, I suspect they’d long since ‘won’ their own personal Tale In The Desert long, long ago and had moved on, and at any rate, everything, (including their stuff and my own), will be vanished in a month or so, when Telling IV begins.

Much of the haul is things that are well beyond my ability to make for myself, and so ‘off limits’ at present, but it’ll certainly cut a few corners later on, when I do unlock the secrets of that particular resource myself!

I’m quite surprised so little of the buildings and equipment in the game is up for grabs in this way. I guess few people ever leave the game, and now, I know why!

The big Technology Push took a new turn with the arrival on the beach spot nextdoor of a New Rival, who promptly put up a monstrosity of a Compound, all asymmetrical angles and mismatched walls, which given my appreciation of order (With a small ‘o’), is tantamount to a declaration of war! (Also with a little ‘w’). I have a few days head start on him, and have so far unlocked the secrets of Leather and Oil. On the other hand, he’s managed to invent the Shovel, which I didn’t see coming. A hard fought race lies ahead…

Much of this race is conducted by the skill training offered at the various Schools and Universities around the world. For some of the techs, I need certain types of manufactured materials, and for some of those, I need preceding techs, but for others, I need to level more. i’m three at the moment, and there are several Tests open to me, some more practical than others. the two easiest, conceptually, at least, are The Principles of Art and Music, and the Principles of Leadership. I’m working on both at the same time.

The Principles of Leadership seems the simplest, on paper anyway. To pass, you need to get 21 other players to sign your Initiation Petition, which you get from the School or University. Easy enough, and a very Social kind of gameplay, but what with ATitD being so vast, and so underpopulated, it can be hard work actually finding anyone to put an X on the parchment. I think the most players I’ve seen in one place to date is seven, and I’m not really the sort to wave paper in the faces of strangers. People as a resource? Perhaps not the correct attitude! It’s strange – I get the impression that the Initiation Petition is a thing that is supposed to be considered in a weighty fashion. “Will this newcomer be a responsible member of the Legal Profession of our Nation?”, sort of thing. Remember, at the top end of this line of Tests, lies the Permaban Sceptre, which isn’t a toy to be handed out causally. I’ve no idea what subsequent Tests are like, mind you, but presumably, by the time you’ve made it to the Real Power, you’re so heavily invested in the community and so well known, that the bored griefer will never make it that far. One hopes anyway!

Anyway, I’m not quite set on that kind of power just yet, and my strategy to pass this test consists mostly of Being Polite at Chariot Stops, which seem to function as the travel network hubs. In MMOs in general, population generally tends to be the densest at Travel Points, and Banks, and in ATitD, you build Chests as needed to act as bank space. It works quite well actually, and most established and veteran players seem polite in turn, friendly and often sign my form before I’ve even Commented On The Weather, which is nice. In turn, I try to help in kind; most players have a ‘Legal…’ menu on them, and this will list any Petitions they have on the go. I read through these, which are mostly either Laws, which will become in-game In Context alterations to what is and isn’t allowed, or Feature Requests, which presumably will all get rolled up and written into A Tale In The Desert IV, by the dev team, which is coming soon. Game Design by Democracy. I try to do it properly, mind you. This is serious stuff, and being a newbie, I don’t really understand what many of the proposals actually mean, so I tend not to sign those out of a sense of pure helpfulness.

The other ongoing test I’m working on is The Principles of Art and Music. For this, you need to build a Sculpture and have 21 people vote that is is ‘Interesting’. These Sculptures are all over the place at this late stage and are made out of dropped resource items, most of which have a distinct object in-world. By arranging 25 of these in a pleasing manner, Art is born! The UI for doing this is a bit of a nightmare to work with, but allows translation and rotation in all three axis of each pieces, granting a surprisingly amount of expression, for an MMO, and is almost Second Life-ish in feel.

Here’s what I made!

[Pics lost in the move. - VH Jul-11]

I call it ‘Extinction’ and it’s had three votes already! Hope it is Quite Interesting, as enough ‘It’s an Eyesore’ votes will get it killed! Mind you, I may have placed it in a bit of an out-of-the-way location, which could cost me in what little passing traffic there is. There’s pros and cons; on the down side, well, I wonder if 21 people will even come across it before the Telling ends. On the upside though, the obvious place to put these; the Chariot Stops, are absolutely crammed with existing Sculptures, which means my own effort would have to be truly exceptional to be noticed and clicked, amid the already quite high standard of craftwork already clustering about the prime locations.

Again, it’s a two-way process, and struggling artists need my vote too. I must admit to being a bit of an Art Critic Wuss to be honest, and will tend to vote on very slack standards, partly out of a sense of duty, rather than actual appreciation. I do tend to vote on lone Sculptures half way along very long desert runs though; in the middle of all that sand, they certainly are interesting, even if they’re technically rubbish, which may help me with my own remote placement. Who can say. I’ve set it up and now have to wait…

Here are some examples of the other art I’ve seen:

All made from common, and not so common, harvested resource items. As a whole, the large proliferation of these pegged out exhibits goes a long way to making what might otherwise be a typical MMO Bland Housing Estate or Wilderness, somewhat more, well….Interesting!

Having got through a somewhat involved tutorial, which I suspect gives a fair impression of the complexity of the game as a whole, its time to find myself a place to call home in Ancient Egypt. The game gives you a number of locations you can teleport to, to start a new life, which by the look of it seem to be banners erected by the existing citizens for this very purpose. Also, for the first 24 hours of life, the new player can ‘reroll’ on this chart, offering a way to see quite a lot of the world without all that tedious running about everywhere.

I say tedious, because A Tale in the Desert is pretty damned big, geographically. There seems to be no mounts that I’ve found yet, and although there are Chariot stops dotted few and far between, which offer a kind of fast travel as found in other MMOs, travel in general, takes a very long time. I suppose there’s something to be said for a world where distance means something, and despite being essentially a vast desert, there’s still quite a lot to see on the way; player outposts and dwellings, sculptures and mini-game puzzles dotted about, and of course, pretty much everything is a resource of some description.

The world seems to be divided up in to geographic regions. Each has a set of schools and universities, a chariot stop, and its own regionwide chat channel. These seem to form hubs, mini communities within the greater nation as a whole. Stumbling through one of these, I gained Level 2. A nearby University of the human Body had one of the Tests on offer, which go to make up the ‘game’ of ATitD, providing some kind of direction and purpose to an otherwise very literal sandbox experience. The Principles of the Human body involves locating and tagging 35 types of plant species, within a 20 minute time limit, which started as soon as I asked about it. Don’t panic!

A hectic time ensued, but fortunately, I think I was somewhere near the Nile at the time, and despite the parched nature of the setting, there seems to be a bewildering variety of trees, shrubs and grasses dotted about. I finished the thing with about three minutes to spare, and viola! Ding! After a lifetime of beating unreasonable quotas of monsters to death, I can quite appreciate a system that requires no killing at all to advance in life.

Much desert nomadry later, I found a School of Architecture, offering another test. For this one, I have to build a Compound, which seems to function as player housing of a sort, although these do seem to be more ‘workshop’ than the generic ‘trophy room’ of most other MMOs. A large proportion of the various tools and equipment needed to get on in life can only be built inside one of these, so it’s time to settle down and pick out a base of operations.

In the end, I picked out a coastal area somewhere around where the present day town of Bi’r Shalatayn is today, on the Red Sea, at the border between modern day Egypt and Sudan. The world map isn’t an exact replica mind you, and ATitD Egypt seems to stretch far to the south of it’s modern borders, across into Libya, Chad, Saudi Arabia and beyond. The area seems sound, having all the resources I’d been shown how to gather in the tutorial, and more. A not too distant collection of the different schools and not far from a crossroads, although the fact that there’s hardly any other dwellings nearby does make me wonder. It’s about half an hour’s run to the nearest Chariot Post hub, with it’s universities and such, which might be a problem later on, but I like the spot and it’ll do for now!

The Compound comes with a neat little blueprint editor, allowing you to go crazy, and then presents you with a list of materials to be loaded into it, before it becomes real, which makes you uncrazify the design when you see how much of the resources I’d never even heard of yet, it needs. One more modest proposal later, it was time to get busy with the Brick Racks, Flax Fields and Wood Planes. Further work with the gathering and processing is then needed, to double the default starting size, and qualify for the test. Ding! Level 3! Saying that, it certainly wasn’t a trivial labour, and took me two session of play to complete.

Quite enjoyed the industry of it all, but more than that, I’m absolutely captivated by the “one-man game of Civilisation” of it all; working out what resources and tools and training is needed to increase my own personally technology tree. So far, I’m still in my own personal Stone Age, with Flint being the most advanced material I can sort out for myself. Hoping to discover Bronze soon though! Hauling myself up form savagery by my own bootstraps. One reason I do so badly in RTS games, is that I get endlessly distracted by the fascinations of the tech tree in those too, and instead of building up cheap units and zerging out, I dig in and refuse to even mount an offensive until I’ve worked up to the orbital lasers or whatever.

In this game, I suspect it’s distracting me from the very required social elements of life in Egypt. It’s a game where cooperation is probably a must, in a great many aspects of society. For example, my currently open ‘Principles of Leadership’ test needs nothing more than 21 other players sign my bit of paper. I’ve got three so far. It’s a game with a very large landmass and very low population, (About a thousand, if the University of Leadership census page is to be believed), most of whom probably all know each other very well. To get on, I’ll have to get involved, but for now, I’m shamelessly indulging in what has probably got to be the best crafting game I’ve ever played, curious to see just how Civilised I can make myself, by my own efforts alone…

Another launch, another blogosphere debate about such nebulous terms as ‘Innovation’, ‘Evolution’, ‘Revolution’ and all sorts of related ‘tions’, most of which seem to be synonyms for ‘Bored of WoW! Moar Differenty!’ Certainly been here before myself, and Tobold seems to have hit the nail on the head (damnit!), with a response to it all, on long the basic lines of ‘Different is already here, just none of you really want that.’ I’m paraphrasing somewhat, but he casually throws out three or four titles which are indeed different, in a very meaningful sense, rather than in the minutiae. They are also extremely unpopular, illustrating a fair amount of hypocrisy in this current, and many previous, clamourings for ‘Different’, which is probably Tobold’s point; I couldn’t say.

Much of his comment thread descends into ‘ya but they r teh suck, ATITD lawlz!’, but it did all fire my own imagination somewhat; specifically regarding A Tale In The Desert. It’s a game you hear almost nothing about. Zubon has some pieces in a category at Kill Ten Rats, but that’s about all I’d ever seen on it. The SirBruce Charts put it at a seemingly constant 1500 or so subscribers, from 2003, right up to today, a figure well below the ‘kill it’ level in most other MMOs, I’d imagine, and yet those 1500 seem to have been there from the start and not ever left.

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of ATitD for quite some time; an MMO which has no combat at all, which is almost exclusively crafting based, and where the rules, ToS, etc are largely written by the players themselves, as a part of the gameplay mechanics. Players gain the ability to permaban other players? Madness! There’s yer Different, right there, and since I am usually there, in the ‘Moar Different!’ mob, one row back, waving a rather apologetic placard, (and also cos I’m one MMO short at present), its probably time I had a look for myself. It might indeed turn out that I don’t really want Different either, but I’ll never know unless I try it.

Download and sign up is simple, easy and available here: http://www.atitd.com/

It seems to be it’s own free trial, and gives you 24 hours of play for free, after which billing and signup is all handled from within the UI, and costs about $13 a month. It’s on it’s third ‘Telling’, and is an MMO with a definite start and end. At some point in the future, III will be closed and IV will start. I have no idea how long remains on III.

First impressions, frankly, were ‘Ewww!’ The characters are primitive, the world rather flat and empty, a bit on the ugly side, the animations are token at best, and the UI is essentially a huge nested cluster of right-click menus. ATitD is not a pretty game, but even the minimal research I’d done over the years had somewhat prepared me for the idea that here, of all places, how it looks isn’t really the point. I suspect in this unique case, you either don’t worry about the Look-N-Feel, or really, this isn’t the game for you, on a lot of levels. And hey, low barrier to entry on the system specs!

I pressed on anyway, roleplaying a much less superficial person than I probably am, to find myself on the Welcoming Island. This tutorial area is a fair old size, and is littered with helpful signposts, which gradually explain the various introductory elements of what I suspect is the meat of the game, it’s vastly elaborate crafting tree.

Your goal at this point, is to become a Citizen of Egypt, largely by managing to get off the island and actually make it to Egypt at all. This is not an insignificant task, and involves building a Ferry Raft. To do this, you need to bootstrap an entire one-man boatbuilding economy, starting with pulling up tufts of grass, and working right up to complex chandlery. Quite daunting, but the UI does give you a helpful checklist or what to do next, and the overall process works well to teach you how all the various interrelated disciplines and construction project pyramid upward, eventually resulting in a boat.

Took a while, and the whole thing greatly reminded me of Pre-NGE Star Wars Galaxies. I was an Architect there, and the whole gathering, sub-combines, increased training unlocks and such all seemed quite similar. Saying that, the Ferry itself, an item that concludes the tutorial, is easily far more complex than the most advanced thing I ever built in Galaxies; the Town Hall, and requires the following:

* 20 Boards

o 20 Wood (Can just pull this off trees)

o 1 Wood Plane (A reusable tool, requiring:)

+ 4 Slate (Semi-rare ground spawn nodes you have to hunt for)

+ 1 Stone Blade

# 2 Slate

+ +1 Stone Blade every time it breaks

* 20 Wood

* 4 Tar (Found in a single spot you have to explore the island to find)

* 4 Rope

o 1 Small Distaff (A reusable tool which needs:)

+ 12 Boards (As above – can reuse the tool)

+ 100 Bricks

# 3 Mud (Ground Node)

# 2 Straw

* 2 Grass (Ground Node – drop some to dry it out into Straw)

# 1 Sand (Ground Node)

# 1 Flimsy Brick Rack (Tool – limited reuses)

* 4 Boards

+ 10 Wood

o 20 Twine

+ 1 Small Distaff

+ 7 Tow

# 1 Flax Comb (Reusable Tool)

* 18 Boards

* 36 Bricks

* 60 Thorns (Found on certain local flora)

# 7 Rotten Flax

* 7 Flax (Dangle this in the water to make it rot)

o 7 Flax Seeds (Given out by the training school, or harvested yourself from existing flax)

* 1 Sail (Mercifully, given you you for free in the tutorial, but probably needs something at least as elaborate again in the main game)

Bit of a step up from ‘Sword Blade + Sword Hilt, press Combine’. In addition to all of the above, there’s skill training to pay for too. ATitD seems not to have money in the conventional sense, and obviously no Orcs to loot for it anyway, so skills are paid for in raw resources, which itself seems to dictate a kind of tech tree of sorts. Advanced skill training requires payment in materials that are made using intermediate skills, and so on down.

In short, there’s a LOT of harvesting and a LOT of crafting in here. If you don’t like Crafting, this is Not The Game For You. I quite liked it, to be honest, and gained an enormous amount of satisfaction from having an achievable purpose to the endless combines of typical MMO crafting, other than just dumping a load of rubbish on an oversaturated market.

It was mostly intuitive and all made a sort of sense, based somewhat in historical accuracy, although the Flax did drive me up the wall. The school gives you three seeds, and then tells you that you only need one to produce an unlimited supply. It won’t give you another three for two minutes. So while you could just take three seeds, make three bundles of flax and then hit the school up for more, to meet the totals, I was determined to figure out the deliberately withheld secret of Flax reproduction. This took at least half an hour of varied experimentation with the different ways you can interact with the Flax Beds, and I came this close to just wiki-ing for it in frustration, but eventually the Eureka Moment came, and I can now generate as many new seeds as I need. Hurrah for me! I Have Invented Farming! I shall not starve! Next stop Alpha Centauri!

(I am not telling how I did it – you can trade me Bronze Working or Horseback Riding for it, like any one else!)

It does feel a bit like that actually; seeing if I, personally, could rebuild civilisation using only my bare hands, if need be. Surprisingly satisfying, and from what I gather, the entire game is essentially this; the players, individually and together, pursuing a number of Tasks, in an attempt to reach some kind of overarching Humanist Enlightenment. We have Quests and Levels elsewhere, but I wonder if here, they actually mean something more than just Time Spent and Guys Killed.

Anyway, I got the raft built and launched, taking two sessions of play, and am now in Egypt, and no longer a Peasant, but a Citizen! And for all that, I’m now only Level One!

Intriguing so far – more to follow, but just now, I can’t decide if it’s “Second Life, but with A Point”, or “Pre-NGE SWG Architect Profession on Steroids”…