Transportation and Storage

Hmm, another fairly fundamental difference from Entropia - and actually this is different from most other MMO style games I have played.

Firstly storage is local to the zone you are in.  Characters have a weight limit so need to store excess items - otherwise movement speed is severely restricted.  This is fine except it throws up the issue of how to move items from one zone to another.  The basic weight limit on a character is 500kg and Qweeg can reach that in under 30 minutes using a steel pick to break rocks for minerals in QA1.  These minerals and stones can be refined down to half their weight but even so it takes very little time to accumulate a massive amount of resource in weight.

This wouldn't be such a problem except that as far as I can tell in QA1 other than those used for refining most of the terminals aren't active.  So this means that if you want to actually craft something out of the resources you have gathered you have to take it to the Saransk zone, where all the terminals are active.  The journey on foot (without being over-encumbered) from QA1 to Saransk takes about 10 minutes or so - providing you can find a route avoiding mobs.  But an over-encumbered avatar would take far longer to do the same journey.

There is a metro, which allows fast travel between zones - but almost all of your items other than money get left behind when you travel.  Even your clothes I believe, which explains why I keep seeing characters running around in just their underwear I guess.  So the metro doesn't provide a solution to this problem.

Entropia handles this issue differently - all storages are linked so items held there can be accessed from any storage unit regardless of where you are in the world.  Additionally their mode of fast travel (teleporters) does allow the transportation of the character's personal inventory.

So what is the solution?  To be honest I don't know at the moment - it could be I have misunderstood something in the game mechanics and there is in fact a simple way round this.  Certainly constantly running between QA1 and Saransk carrying 500kg at a time doesn't seem very appealing.  Neither does taking a snail's pace trip over-encumbered.  One answer I guess is to simply buy what you need from the market in Saransk - but that doesn't seem like a very cost effective way of playing.

More investigation is needed here methinks.  I do wonder actually if this is a method of providing a reason for implementing vehicles into the game?  It seems as though they are planned but not yet implemented - perhaps owning for example your own truck might allow you faster travel between zones and to move some of your inventory across with you.

Societies - Fit or Miss?

So last night Qweeg became a proud member of an AfterWorld Society - The Misfits.  Everyone I have met in there so far seems very helpful and friendly, just what you want from a gaming society in fact.  AfterWorld Societies are similar to those in Entropia - and guilds in other games, but at the moment I just don't know enough about them to cover anything much here.  I will write a more detailed Society blog entry later on.

In addition to being in a society Qweeg is now also in a corporation.  This concept is new to me - it seems like a Society is a group of players who play together, share information and generally help each other out, whereas a Corporation is more of a financial entity, which can own land, businesses etc..  Entropia kind of treat those two concepts as the same thing and packages them both up in a Society.  The corporation functionality doesn't seem to be really implemented yet - I imagine land ownership will be available in the General Release of AfterWorld later in the year.  Again I will add a blog on this once I know more.

Suffice it to say that I am very happy with my choice of Society and that they took pity on Qweeg the Noob :) 

Q and A

Short and sweet post this one.  Up until now I have been referring to the starting zone as Q1.  In fact  I believe it is actually QA1 - (Quarantine  A1 in full).  What a noob I am!

Trade, Crafting and the Economy

Having wandered around Saransk for a bit - not really knowing what to do next I decide to head back to Q1 - but on foot.  I have a healing kit, courtesy or a nice lady from a society called Shadow Corpse, and a gun that I bought at the auction.  Confident in Qweeg's survival instincts I head back towards Q1.

It quickly becomes apparent that whilst my gun might look like a Bad MF - it really doesn't work very well without any ammunition!  This makes the journey back a little scarier than originally planned, but Qweeg does eventually make it back in one piece.

It is at this point that I start to realise that AfterWorld has some quite far reaching differences to Entropia.  Whilst it seems to play the same - combat is very similar, mining from what I have read is similar albeit a little more complex in AW etc. - it is different in 2 very important ways. 

Firstly crafting, is a) much more complex in AW, and b) plays a vital role in the game.  In Entropia whilst crafters had their place in the game they were very much a poor relation to hunters and miners.  That was in part because so many items could be bought or found without the need for crafting.  In AW almost everything needs to be crafted.  And more interesting nothing lasts forever.  In Entropia items are either Limited or Unlimited - limited means when they are worn out you have to throw them away, unlimited means they can be repaired whenever they wear out.  This again negates the need for a crafter, since once you have a good item you never need to replace it.  In AW all items can only be repaired a certain number of times before they are useless - and so crafting is a much more vital profession.

The second key difference is how the economy itself works.  In Entropia everything has a TT (Trade Terminal) value and can be sold via the said terminal back to the game for that value.  Some items have a value far higher than TT if sold to another player as they may be rare or in high demand.  Other items may not be worth selling to another player so just get traded in at the terminal.  This is not possible in AW - all trading is player to player, and so the economy is one completely dictated by supply and demand of the players in the game.

These two differences alone give a completely different complexion to the game - and something it will take some time before I start to understand the full impact, and the best strategy for the game.  This is just the challenge I was looking for - the good bits of Entropia with the bad bits replaced with more good bits.  So far things are looking good!

The Big Bad World

So, Qweeg is now a citizen but what next?  Well now I have freedom to move out of the starting zone (Q1) I might as well take it.  The first time you venture out is a bit strange - essentially your mind essence is packaged up in a little flying saucer that you fly through a maze where eventually you arrive at a new zone, Saransk, where your mind is reunited with your body.  Most bizarre!

Saransk is a large town, non-pvp so you are quite safe (as is Q1 incidentally) with lots buildings containing terminals that you can interact with.  Many of these were also in Q1 but only a few of them actually work.

So how does the game hang together?  Well every action potentially grants you either Skill advancement Units (SAU) or level gains in a certain skill.  There are many skills in the game and they relate to the different actions you perform.  So for example chopping down trees may give you gains in the "Nature" skill, whereas using a healing a kit may give you a gain in the "Restore" skill.  There are plenty of crossovers as many skills relate to many different professions.  Once you level in s skill reaches 100 (%) then you can unblock the next level.  This is what the SAU is used for.  So for example my Strength skill reaches 100% (I am at stage 1).  I then won't get any more strength skills until I use some SAU to unblock stage 2.  I will then be at 0% on stage 2 and I will be able to receive strength skill gains again.

The better the stage you are at in a skill the better you are able to perform related actions.  One other thing - you can intentionally block gains in certain skills so as to focus your gains in other areas.  For example if you wanted to skill up Nature but not Strength but both skills could be gained from chopping down trees you could block Strength.  Then you would only gain Nature skills until Strength was unblocked again.

Overall this is a similar concept to Entropia although slightly more sophisticated.  That is assuming I have understood how it works correctly, and there is no guarantee of that.

Getting Started

And so we begin...

...After navigating my through the standard avatar creation process - Qweeg is back, and this time sporting a silver-grey crew cut - nice ;).  Then it's out into the big bad "After" World.

The first thing I am struck by - and I will return to this point several times in the next few posts - is just how similar this game feels to Entropia.  The HUD has many of the same features, movement and interaction with the game world feels the same, and within an hour I am pretty comfortable with the basics of getting about. 

AfterWorld is FTP (free to play) - however you can donate (deposit) real money in to assist with your gaming experience.  $1 = 10 AWD (AfterWorld Dollars).  Whilst there is currently no way to withdraw money from the game this is a feature that will be in the final release version.  This follows exactly the same model as Entropia.

Both games have something in the game that you can do to earn in game money at no cost, so in that respect it is perfectly possible to play for free - and actually to make a small profit.  Obviously the game creators don't want people to do this, and so these options are both time consuming and really not much fun.  In Afterworld there 3 free activities:  Mining rocks for minerals; chopping trees down for wood; and cutting plants up for medical extracts.

These are more interesting (marginally) than "Sweating" in Entropia, but are made less attractive because the free tools that are supplied to do this are very slow to use - so only small amounts of resources can be collected compared to using the faster more advanced versions of the tools that are not free.

The second restriction on playing for free is that many features in the game are not available to you until you become a citizen.  You are also restricted to the starting area (zone) of the game, and most importantly you do not gain any skills until you are a citizen.  Now it is possible to gain citizenship without depositing, but it takes time; is repetitive; and quite frankly didn't interest me at all.  It's great that the option is there to play for free, but also that I am not forced into doing something that doesn't interest me very much.

So after playing for one evening I deposited and the next day - Viola, Dave Qweeg Lister is now a citizen!

Qweeg arrives in AfterWorld

The date - Monday 4th July 2011; the event - Dave "Qweeg" Lister arrives in AfterWorld.

To give some background I played a game called Entropia for around 4 years, until the cost of playing became too prohibitive.  At that point the Entropia incarnation of Qweeg was retired and at the time I thought confined to the gaming scrap heap for good.  But a year on and he is back knocking on my door with a gaming thirst that not even a gallon of Stella will quench!

And so I reluctantly open the door to the gaming world once more, after first checking that the path back down the dark-side towards Entropia is forever blocked: oh no we are not heading down that route again my friend.

Several game trials later I come, somewhat reluctantly, to the conclusion that whilst Entropia is no longer for me, the concept of a game with a real cash economy very much is.  And I know that in that case there is only really one alternative - AfterWorld.  Still in Alpha/Beta stage, although now close to general release, it seems stable enough for me to dip my toes in without the risk of drowning.

And so Dave Qweeg Lister is reborn, to start out again as a gaming newbie and hopefully to share his experiences here along the way.