LOVE First Impressions

Sadly, but not unexpectedly, I have logged in and played LOVE relatively little in the ensuing almost-week since I posted last. Partly because my life is filled with all the mundane tasks typical of the servile class, but also because honestly I found the experience a bit ... meh.

I mention that only because I would not consider this a proper review or criticism, and I would hope nobody reading it does, either. These are merely some of my impressions thus far. Overall, I doubt I will continue with LOVE past the 30 days alotted by my near-$14 (US) payment, however I can see myself coming back in the future depending on the directions taken by LOVE's one-man development team (Eskil Steenberg), because I do love what appear to be the core ideals of the game.

These core ideals, or perhaps more simply the single ideal of LOVE is to literally be a sandbox. That is the way I have taken it, at any rate. We are not talking sandbox like EVE, Darkfall or pre-CU SWG ... in LOVE it is your job to take the chaotic stuff of the ever-shifting world and mold it to your own whim.

Well, your whim and the whim of the other players around you. LOVE is very much made to be a cooperative building game. The word cooperative is a key word; players must work together to maintain order amidst the chaos of the game. A player-created city that takes a week to create can be destroyed in mere hours with barely a trace left.

It seems this is a sticking point for some - the extreme lack of permanence, the chaos, the anti-achievement mindset that must be cultivated to thrive. To those raised to achieve - to the point even their entertainment must mirror achievement-based ideals - LOVE certainly must not appeal.

Of course, even if the rest of LOVE is a wreck (it's not), this is the one aspect of the game that not only appeals to me, but that I find brilliant. Order amidst chaos does come with a very heavy price: it must be maintained with zealous diligence. The result is a long-term functioning base or city becomes more of what I would describe as a colony - an ant colony.

Some players go about their routines, molding tunnels, windows, stairs and other physical features of the base as is their whim. Other players will do the same, but range out into the wider world in search of the tokens that reward the entire colony with upgraded abilities (prettier windows, better weapons, radios, energy sources, etc).

Still other players may decide to hunt down and kill the AI competitors in the wider world. You can bet these AI competitors are also doing the same, and so far a common cause of a colony's doom has been the punishing barrage from the artillery of a nearby AI colony. The AI opponents also will also quickly  infiltrate and destroy any player colony which does not have proper defenses such as walls.

Which brings us to my first real criticism against LOVE as it currently exists. I love the game with regard to its core gameplay, or at least what I currently understand that to be (and have attempted to elucidate above). However, the I have the feeling that the game is currently too chaotic.

Days sweep past in mere minutes and it is difficult to see in the dark so before you know it you get stuck in one of the numerous crannies or pits in the landscape. This makes navigating tunnels in the dark a nightmare.

I don't necessarily think the AI bots are too aggressive as much as I think they either aren't scaled properly (I suspect they aren't scaled at all) to the level of player activity in an area. Rather than providing a challenge they seem overly punishing and the entropy rate of a colony seems a bit too fast. In other words, if the world was slowed down just a bit, I would probably have a better time.

That the world of LOVE is too chaotic is, of course, not a big criticism and certainly not enough to keep me away from the game by any means. These are the sort of typical growing pains any new enterprise suffers, especially if that enterprise is as complex as an MMO. If the game survives, one would hope a consensus about such matters will provide the needed guidance for scaling and balance concerns. Or not, Steenberg could just tell everyone to go jump in a lake after all.

If EVE Online's learning curve is a steep cliff, then LOVE's learning curve is a bottomless pit.

My main criticism and the thing that will keep me away from LOVE as it exists now lies in a complex relationship between how I view its pay-to-play model and the level of professionalism that I see in the game.

1. I can't set my own name. Why am I paying a premium for a persistent game that is not really persistent? I totally get all the art-fag bullshit, believe me - I eat it up. But I can't, at least, give my in-game self a simple identity of my own choosing? Preposterous!

2. There are misspellings in the game. As evinced by practically everything you have written on your site, I already know that you suck at spelling, Eskil, and that is OK; you make up for it in other ways like being a good programmer and focusing on innovation. However, why am I paying for a game that has an egregious amount of spelling errors?

This may seem nit-picky, but notice I said, and I quoth: "why am I paying for a game that has ..." Poor spelling is highly unprofessional - feckless, even. If you can't spell, fine - but since I am paying a fee you should expect that I would expect you to hire someone who can spell.

3. The UI is horrible. My favorite thing about the UI? That passwords are not shadowed on entry. That leaves me with such a safe, secure feeling about the server I am logging into.

When I say UI, please note I do not mean the HUD. I like the HUD, it is clean and simple. It's easy to configure and use - I might almost say it's a pleasure. Me like. But really, how many times do I have to log into the game before it remembers to turn off the Tutorial text automatically? No, pressing the button to make it go away as my first action of the play session does not count ("why am I paying for a game that has ...").

The fonts are near-unreadable, and while the effects added to them are visually interesting, because the fonts are small and hard to read I no longer even bother to try and read what is flashing around on the screen like some sort of acid flashback.

4. Lastly, I have reservations about the pricing. OK, I already know the reasons given for the pricing model and I don't really disagree with them per se. But while one would hope Steenberg would be as innovative in his revenue model as he is with his virtual-environment-designing skills, that may not end up being the case. Looks like he went for the same old same-old. Maybe he was too distracted by trying to figure out how to shadow password fields on the login screen?

Aside from the reasons given above (like the spelling errors - as a literate person I'll never let that slide), I think we can take the premise that LOVE is an extremely sub-niche product as a reality. Even if Steenberg could tap every person in the civilized world who would be interested in playing LOVE, I feel certain it would still be a tiny fraction of the playerbase of the 800-lbs gorillas (i.e. WoW, Atlantica Online, etc.), let alone come within the same ballpark of the numbers of smaller games like EQ2 or LOTRO.

While my respect for humanity might increase a bit if this opinion of mine was proved false, I'm certain it is more-or-less accurate. And I also do not think that is necessarily a bad thing, just like any other work of culture, niche games are the wonderful spice that break up the monotony of the banal.

In short, the reason I do not like the current pricing scheme is that I fear it could starve off the oxygen of exposure that a niche game like this needs to succeed. (As an interesting aside, though, subbing for a month actually gets you two accounts though the caveat is that the parent account must be logged in for the child account to work.) And while there has been relatively good press coverage and word-of-mouth for such an odd-ball project, I think the subscription in turning away prospective players not quite trusting enough to lay out the fee negates those gains.

But I hope I am wrong about that, and like EVE or Darkfall, I hope LOVE becomes successful at providing a unique experience to its audience and providing its creator with some income. But LOVE is far, far more niche than either EVE or Darkfall have ever been.

L O V E

Crap, can you believe I missed the launch of  LOVE? And it was a full month ago?? This has probably been the most anticipated ever to cross paths with the reddit hive-mind, and I missed it.  Extreme hyperbole aside, I guess that's what happens when you lose touch with reality in asynchronous blahblahscript and php debauchery. And to think I was going to spend my 15 dollars of milk-money on a month of LOTRO.

If you aren't already aware of it, LOVE is the brainchild of Eskil Steenberg, a one-man indie-game-making madman. It features a lush, impressionistic style fully rendered in a 3d world and it has completely open-ended gameplay - literally a sandbox. Steenberg describe it as "a cooperative online first person adventure game." ...

You play as a scavanger on a small planet who together with other scvangers will build a settlement by placeing a Monolith some where in the world. This Monolith makes the ground lose so that you can shape the environment around it in to what ever you want. Build walls, catacoms, houses and shape your settlement any way you want.

To strengthen and evolve your settlement, you will need to head out in to the world to find tokens to bring back the settlement. Once placed in the settlement they give everyone in the settlement new tools to build new things and new abillities. With time you will gain tokens that will let you build powergrids to build defences and to manufacture power up pods.

OK, you know I will have to break my long-standing tradition of not updating this blog more than once every two-four months to bring you more news about my experiences in this game. Even if it isn't that great, I am positive it will be an interesting experience. Just look at what we are talking about:

OK, I need to go now and get my account set up and see how it goes.