Game: Terraria
Aug. 6th, 2012 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livVerdict: Terraria hits a lot of buttons for what I want from a computer game.
Reasons for playing it:syllopsium rec'd it originally, I think, and I played with it a couple of times but didn't get into it at all. Then there was a Making Light thread about Minecraft, which sort of encouraged me to give Terraria another go (Terraria being, essentially, Minecraft for casual gamers).
How it came into my hands: Steam sale. I am finding Steam a very good way of buying computer games. I don't really mind DRM for games, because with most, I just want to play them for a few months until I get bored, I don't feel the need to own them outright, so DRM seems a reasonably fair way of protecting the game makers' revenue. And Steam gives value added in exchange for having to put up with DRM, it provides a reasonably pleasant framework in which to play games, with some achievements and a little bit of social, and is better at making stuff just work than trying to install things directly onto my computer. The other thing it does is sell retro games; I've been wanting for a long time to be able to pay money to get hold of 80s and 90s classics, rather than having to mess around with emulators or dodgy "abandonware" sites, not to mention that plenty of games companies were aggressive about policing pirated versions but not actually making the original versions available for sale. And sometimes they sell recent games for pocket money; I've spent a good couple of hundred quid on random things because each individual one was cheap enough for me to give it a go, whereas I just can't see myself spending tens of pounds on a computer game. Especially since the things that make computer games expensive are not really things I want, I don't want hundreds of hours of gameplay or a complex plot or skills which are difficult to master, and I'm neutral about pretty graphics, I want a game I can play as a timewaster to clear my brain for ten minutes.
So, Terraria has been one of my most successful purchases. Steam says I've played it for about 50 hours, and it's still giving me new interesting experiences. It's not addictive in the way that an arcade / puzzle game can be, it's not "just one more go so I can beat my highscore!" Which is very good if I'm using it for breaks from work or to wind down before sleep, I have no willpower problems with playing for ten minutes and then stopping. But I do keep wanting to come back to it. There's just enough story to keep it interesting, but there isn't a plot as such, so it doesn't matter if you leave it alone for several weeks, there's no danger of forgetting what was going on. The story-ish feel comes from the fact that it's an exploring and crafting game. You can explore a new region of the map, which allows you to find new equipment, which in turn lets you explore more dangerous regions. And your actions permanently alter the world, including building stuff, which makes it a whole lot more immersive than more traditional casual games where everything resets each time you die and restart.
In many ways the thing it's most like is the original Super Mario or Sonic, it's a side-scroller, essentially, with lots of stuff that is trying to kill you and lots of fun hidden chambers, and occasional bits where a bit of manual dexterity helps but you can pretty much play it with two fingers and you don't have to have lightning fast reactions most of the time. But unlike Super Mario you don't have the annoying grind of having to start again from the beginning every time, you get an ongoing, developing experience. The thing I most like about most computer games is finding out what the next level will be like, so the exploring element really appeals to me. By default Terraria generates worlds from random seeds, but uses enough clustering to make it feel most of the time that you're actually exploring somewhere with a distinct character, it doesn't have that samey feel that crude randomly generated maps can. I'm intrigued to play some of the player-generated worlds which are intentionally designed, but I suspect many of them are going to be too hard for me.
The thing is, I'm really quite rubbish at Terraria! I have been playing on softcore where dying is a mere nuisance and you don't lose any of your accumulated stuff, and on autopause so that you can do things like change weapons without being bombarded while you open up the menu. And I still basically die all the time, and it's taken me until now to get to the point where I have a decent set of equipment. I haven't tried fighting any bosses yet. But I do like the fact that it offers these easy settings, because it's fun but not fun enough that I want to spend a lot of time perfecting my interaction with the interface to be able to get anywhere. I don't know if a more serious gamer would find the harder modes sufficiently challenging to be interesting, though.
The interface is honestly not that great. I generally don't like mixed mouse and keyboard games, and Terraria has additional annoyances to do with how you pick things up and put them down. There seems to be essentially no way to distinguish between wielding an object and placing it, you just have to keep clicking until it eventually decides to place. And there's not many visual cues about whether you're successfully interacting with the world or not (eg is this stone too hard for me to mine? I can't tell except by hacking at it for a while.) Also it's a bit too easy to misclick and accidentally consume a potion or craft something (using up raw materials) when you were trying to scroll through the menu to find a different thing to craft.
The world is more or less generic swords-and-sorcery kinda deal, but there are some cute humorous touches. The graphics are deliberately retro, evocative of eight-bit pixelly side-scrollers of 15-20 years ago, but pretty, and water flows and plants grow and the monsters interact with you in more sophisticated ways than following a set pattern or just homing in on you. For people who like making furniture, clothes and decorative stuff, there are plenty of opportunities for that; for me, I'm more interested in the exploring and upgrading my equipment, and building / delving in a purely pragmatic way to provide protection from enemies or strategic ground to fight them on. But I like that the rewards are meaningful within the game's world, you don't get a badge of achievement, you get a better weapon or a new magical power.
The main annoying thing about the world-building is that the NPCs are irritatingly sexist. I could do without the whole sexy-nurse shtick, and looking at the wiki decent female characters are thin on the ground – I haven't met all the NPCs yet, just the Guide, the Merchant, the Demolitionist, all male, and the Nurse, who has breasts bigger than her head and high heels (despite being a tiny eight-bit style sprite) and makes stupid innuendos. *sigh*
In some ways I'm finding Terraria satisfying in a bit the same way that Civ is. It doesn't give me quite as much of a flow state, but the world is more interesting to explore, and because it's totally non-linear and totally modifiable by building and delving, there's pretty much unlimited possibilities to construct strategic fortifications and traps. Which is in many ways more satisfying than just having to fight the monsters wherever the programmer decided they would show up.
Reasons for playing it:
syllopsium rec'd it originally, I think, and I played with it a couple of times but didn't get into it at all. Then there was a Making Light thread about Minecraft, which sort of encouraged me to give Terraria another go (Terraria being, essentially, Minecraft for casual gamers). How it came into my hands: Steam sale. I am finding Steam a very good way of buying computer games. I don't really mind DRM for games, because with most, I just want to play them for a few months until I get bored, I don't feel the need to own them outright, so DRM seems a reasonably fair way of protecting the game makers' revenue. And Steam gives value added in exchange for having to put up with DRM, it provides a reasonably pleasant framework in which to play games, with some achievements and a little bit of social, and is better at making stuff just work than trying to install things directly onto my computer. The other thing it does is sell retro games; I've been wanting for a long time to be able to pay money to get hold of 80s and 90s classics, rather than having to mess around with emulators or dodgy "abandonware" sites, not to mention that plenty of games companies were aggressive about policing pirated versions but not actually making the original versions available for sale. And sometimes they sell recent games for pocket money; I've spent a good couple of hundred quid on random things because each individual one was cheap enough for me to give it a go, whereas I just can't see myself spending tens of pounds on a computer game. Especially since the things that make computer games expensive are not really things I want, I don't want hundreds of hours of gameplay or a complex plot or skills which are difficult to master, and I'm neutral about pretty graphics, I want a game I can play as a timewaster to clear my brain for ten minutes.
So, Terraria has been one of my most successful purchases. Steam says I've played it for about 50 hours, and it's still giving me new interesting experiences. It's not addictive in the way that an arcade / puzzle game can be, it's not "just one more go so I can beat my highscore!" Which is very good if I'm using it for breaks from work or to wind down before sleep, I have no willpower problems with playing for ten minutes and then stopping. But I do keep wanting to come back to it. There's just enough story to keep it interesting, but there isn't a plot as such, so it doesn't matter if you leave it alone for several weeks, there's no danger of forgetting what was going on. The story-ish feel comes from the fact that it's an exploring and crafting game. You can explore a new region of the map, which allows you to find new equipment, which in turn lets you explore more dangerous regions. And your actions permanently alter the world, including building stuff, which makes it a whole lot more immersive than more traditional casual games where everything resets each time you die and restart.
In many ways the thing it's most like is the original Super Mario or Sonic, it's a side-scroller, essentially, with lots of stuff that is trying to kill you and lots of fun hidden chambers, and occasional bits where a bit of manual dexterity helps but you can pretty much play it with two fingers and you don't have to have lightning fast reactions most of the time. But unlike Super Mario you don't have the annoying grind of having to start again from the beginning every time, you get an ongoing, developing experience. The thing I most like about most computer games is finding out what the next level will be like, so the exploring element really appeals to me. By default Terraria generates worlds from random seeds, but uses enough clustering to make it feel most of the time that you're actually exploring somewhere with a distinct character, it doesn't have that samey feel that crude randomly generated maps can. I'm intrigued to play some of the player-generated worlds which are intentionally designed, but I suspect many of them are going to be too hard for me.
The thing is, I'm really quite rubbish at Terraria! I have been playing on softcore where dying is a mere nuisance and you don't lose any of your accumulated stuff, and on autopause so that you can do things like change weapons without being bombarded while you open up the menu. And I still basically die all the time, and it's taken me until now to get to the point where I have a decent set of equipment. I haven't tried fighting any bosses yet. But I do like the fact that it offers these easy settings, because it's fun but not fun enough that I want to spend a lot of time perfecting my interaction with the interface to be able to get anywhere. I don't know if a more serious gamer would find the harder modes sufficiently challenging to be interesting, though.
The interface is honestly not that great. I generally don't like mixed mouse and keyboard games, and Terraria has additional annoyances to do with how you pick things up and put them down. There seems to be essentially no way to distinguish between wielding an object and placing it, you just have to keep clicking until it eventually decides to place. And there's not many visual cues about whether you're successfully interacting with the world or not (eg is this stone too hard for me to mine? I can't tell except by hacking at it for a while.) Also it's a bit too easy to misclick and accidentally consume a potion or craft something (using up raw materials) when you were trying to scroll through the menu to find a different thing to craft.
The world is more or less generic swords-and-sorcery kinda deal, but there are some cute humorous touches. The graphics are deliberately retro, evocative of eight-bit pixelly side-scrollers of 15-20 years ago, but pretty, and water flows and plants grow and the monsters interact with you in more sophisticated ways than following a set pattern or just homing in on you. For people who like making furniture, clothes and decorative stuff, there are plenty of opportunities for that; for me, I'm more interested in the exploring and upgrading my equipment, and building / delving in a purely pragmatic way to provide protection from enemies or strategic ground to fight them on. But I like that the rewards are meaningful within the game's world, you don't get a badge of achievement, you get a better weapon or a new magical power.
The main annoying thing about the world-building is that the NPCs are irritatingly sexist. I could do without the whole sexy-nurse shtick, and looking at the wiki decent female characters are thin on the ground – I haven't met all the NPCs yet, just the Guide, the Merchant, the Demolitionist, all male, and the Nurse, who has breasts bigger than her head and high heels (despite being a tiny eight-bit style sprite) and makes stupid innuendos. *sigh*
In some ways I'm finding Terraria satisfying in a bit the same way that Civ is. It doesn't give me quite as much of a flow state, but the world is more interesting to explore, and because it's totally non-linear and totally modifiable by building and delving, there's pretty much unlimited possibilities to construct strategic fortifications and traps. Which is in many ways more satisfying than just having to fight the monsters wherever the programmer decided they would show up.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-06 05:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-06 05:38 pm (UTC)