Aided by one of those two mates I was able to get up and running with some armour, tools and a small dwelling in no time, I guess I'm lucky in that respect as it saved me that period of running around the wilderness half naked with a piece of driftwood as a makeshift axe because that's all you get when you start!
As an alpha release (£14.99) it's pretty darned stable, the 'create your character' screen (male only at this point) has loads of options to change body shape, size, face, hair, even tattoos and voice! Once you're finished with the customisations the game plops you onto a beach wearing just a loincloth and an rudimentary axe.
From then on it's the usual scavenging for resources and building... although the building is a means to an end because if you quit the game then log back into the same server you were on you will have to recreate your character. To prevent this you need to build a bed and place it in the world somewhere, building one requires find the necessary resources to build one so whilst you're doing that it makes sense to place that bed inside a construction of some sort, so you can see that as soon as you start the game you're pretty much in Minecraft mode!
The game is very much like Minecraft in the order of construction - find materials, create a workbench, create better tools for 'mining resources', then create material blocks from 'Blueprints' found in your inventory, place those blocks to create a building. Although it's not possible to dig down, at the moment there are no plans to include this.
The game gives a player the chance to be King and, as King, can charge a tax for every resource the other players on that server collect (so if the tax is 20% and you collect 100 wood, 20 of it goes to the King and you collect 80). The tax can be between 0% and 20%, the server I'm on the King has it at 0% although from SMS texts sent from my mate some sort of coup happened overnight so probably when I log back in today that tax may have changed! No matter, I'm quite happy to pay the tax for the time being as I'm very much in 'build mode' where I need to get stable roots down before I start mixing it up with other players plus I don't think the wooden armour my character is wearing will stand-up against some of the steel-clad players I've seen!
When seeing other players the general etiquette is to unequip your weapon and wave to them, then engage verbally by pressing 'v' if you've got voice setup. Some servers have rules about PvP, such as on ours where players aren't allowed to attack on sight, you must communicate first. Unfortunately hacking is rife at the moment and some players are not averse to raiding your dwelling whilst you're offline so it's advisable to try and construct it as securely as possible and make it hard for them by using harder building materials, locking doors, raising the structure on stilts and building high, thick walls. My friend took me on a tour of his castle (and it literally is a castle, he's done a great job) and has hidden all his resource chests inside the walls and only he knows where they are!
Graphically it's beautiful if you're lucky enough to have a powerful GPU, sun streaming through the trees anyone:
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| So tranquil! |
Anyway, that's enough reviewing, don't know why I am to be honest as I'm still a n00b in this game... I'm off to discover if my menial dwelling is still standing and if the political situation on the server is stable!
