Otherland (Early Access Preview)

As if the zombie craze hasn’t gone on long enough, now we have games themselves coming back from the dead! Otherland is a game that has been in the works for a long time now. It's been a long, hard journey for this MMO based on the novels of Tad Williams. Investors poured money into the project, but the original developers, Singapore-based RealU, allegedly squandered the money, bringing the whole thing to a halt, and the original publishers, dtp entertainment, ended up declaring insolvency. Those investors were not going to just eat all that money, and Polish developers Drago Entertainment were given the Hercluean task of picking up the pieces. Soon, the word was out that Otherland was coming back from the dead, and you can check it out now on Early Access. Keep reading to find out what we thought of it.

Plot

The game begins in a frantic rush to calm the destruction of the Virtual Reality (VR) world, Otherland. You are met by a mysterious man named Sellars who informs you that you have been summoned to help stop the destruction caused by the devious mogul Felix Jongleur. After deciding whether you are Bruce or Caitlin Jenner, you are given an opportunity to test each of the 4 classes: a Marksman utilizing distance and ranged weapons, an Assassin exerting mastery of subtlety and speed to outmaneuver enemies, an Energizer using your weapons either to imbue friendly units with power and health or blast your enemies to pieces, or a Warrior using sheer strength to overpower your foes. All classes have 3 weapons they can keep, mimicking specializations in other MMOs.

You are told that the only way to save Otherland is to destroy a throne beneath a gigantic winged Egyptian-looking creature that I can only assume is the virtualized embodiment of Felix. You succeed in destroying the throne and the world explodes, presumably destroying everything in it. Seven years later, you awaken in a VR holding zone aptly titled "limbo", and the story continues with you trying to uncover conspiracies and mysteries ... assuming you can stick it out.

Bit by Bit

As far as tutorials are concerned, they let you test out a fully leveled version of each class before you have to choose, but they don't give you any context. Despite spending 5 minutes testing each class, I still knew nothing about what I was doing. There is no talent tree for you to explore your skills, no explanation of how to use the weapons, and no player equipment screen. They just place you in front of enemies and leave you to figure out the combat system on your own. I just mostly mashed buttons. The interface options are also really confusing –  for example, if you hit the player equipment key [P] and nothing happens, you'll likely think there's no way to view the items you have equipped. But somewhere down the line, *poof* suddenly [P] accesses the equipment screen. And certain keys don’t always work how you'd expect them to. For instance, you open the PvP battleground menu using [T], but hitting [T] again doesn't dismiss the menu. You have to hit [Esc] and bring up the options menu to close it – this is a simple fix that could go a long way.

And speaking of menus – they're all pretty unintutive at this time. “Submit” and “Accept” buttons were off to the left rather than at the bottom, and with quest descriptions whose text extended below the boundary of the quest menu, you had to find an obscure white scroll tab and drag it down – trying to scroll with the mouse wheel was an exercse in futility. Sometimes multiple menus would overlap and make it hard to read, and others wouldn't even close properly.

The quest tracker is actually well done, and quests were straightforward enough, but having to select a quest-giver multiple times to accept and complete a quest gets nauseating, especially coupled with an over-the-shoulder zoom that occurs each time you select the quest-giver. There's no real targeting system at this time – unlike other MMO’s where there's a mouse icon, or where tabbing between friendlies/enemies is available, Otherland opts for an “orient the camera in the right direction to target” system that is both faulty and frustrating. Further compounding the matter are the indistinguishable NPC selections. You can’t tell if you are targeting the right guy, so you just hope for the best.

Other problems included characters getting, sometimes leaving you with no other option than to start a new character. Enemies respawn too quickly at other times, and sometimes your character just up and disappears. Another problem are the looong load times entering certain areas. Then again, all of these problems are certainly fixable, and I'm sure the devs are finding them just as frustrating as I did

Is Otherland worth playing? Short answer – absolutely, if you're willing to support a growing project. Like many games financed without the backing of a major publisher, it's going to take time for Otherland to reach perfection. The absence of Scrooge McDuck gold vaults typically reserved for AAA titles means that developers like Drago will have to do their work piecemeal. The unfortunate result of combining a game enormous in its scope with gradual funding is that some elements get left out for some time. In Otherland’s case, certain finishing touches are needed to bring the game together. The developers are stuck in a sort of Catch-22, however, as a result of being forced to launch. They need people to buy the game to finance it further, but before the game people buy at this time is far from finished. So if you want to help, go ahead, and let the devs know what you think – that's the point of Early Access, after all.

Hong Kong Light Show

But I'm not that impressed yet – This has been a multi-million dollar venture, and yet NPCs look like characters from Final Fantasy X. Club rooms are blindingly bright. Your hero character's outline is blurred despite extremely clear action bars. “Whatever bro, you’ve never designed a game before.” True, but I know what I like and this isn’t quite doing it for me just yet.

Multiplayer