Essential Tremors

So, a friend of mine convinced me to try out a new game, Secret of the Solstice (SoS). It’s one of the reasons your comic is late today, so I suppose that says a little about the game.

Notably, this is an open beta test of the game, so one should expect to find bugs. One of the first things that struck me was the sheer number of updates that the game had to download and patch into itself after the installation. It took about a half hour to download the game and another 30-45 minutes for the patches to download and apply. I also had a problem starting the game up the first run through. The splash screen window came up, but there were no window controls (the minimise, restore, and close buttons on the top right) and there was no menu within the screen that gave me any sorts of options. Terminating the game and restarting it solved that problem (sortof). The window controls do not appear for the game window, ever, though the internal game menus did appear and were functional.

When you first create your character you only get to choose hair style, colour, gender, and name. That’s it. So, everyone pretty much looks the same when they start and only begins to differentiate by acquiring equipment as they progress through the game. This is an interesting psychological feature because, as you may have guessed, all the equipment is also quite generic if you work for it through the game. The only way to get pseudo-unique equipment is to purchase it via the game’s cash-shop. Items range from experience earning boosters to simple addons like goggles that don’t appear to have any affect on gameplay. The creators of the game have stacked the deck against most people who don’t want to blend in with the crowd. One thing I will say is that the shop actually does kindof suck. Not that the concept is bad, but the reality is that you’re only RENTING any items that you “purchase” for a limited time. Everything in the shop is either a consumable item that you don’t keep after use or has an expiry date after which it vanishes from your inventory. Lame.

A nice thing about SoS is the tutorial for noobs. This takes you from your first level through to level 10 and appears to be mandatory. It involves a number of quests, most of which are pretty straight-forward if you read the requests carefully. However, there are still a number of errors in the game with respect to how things are named. In a number of quests you will be asked to fetch various items, like 10 long sticks, for example. However, you will not find a single long stick in the whole of the game, but you will find 10 long staves. If you get stuck in a quest, ask someone or review the quest info and use your noodle

The graphics in the game are pretty good. It’s a mix of 3D background elements and character/monster sprites. You can change perspective and the isometric angle to some degree as well as the zoom. My one complaint is that there’s no way to change the screen resolution, the window size, or to play at full-screen. If there is such an option, it’s very well hidden.

I turned off the music sound-track as soon as I could find it. Maybe it’s just me, but I get sick of in-game music pretty fast and honestly don’t know why game companies bother with musical soundtracks at all. Atmospheric sound effects and mood-setting audio is okay, but generic music is quite dull. Incidentally, disabling the music wasn’t quite as easy as I had expected since it’s buried in the game configuration menu under a widget called BGM. BGM!? Of course it stands for BackGroundMusic, but it’s very non-obvious the first time through.

There are no guilds in the game yet, but team play is easy enough to get into. There is a party mode where up to about 50 people can join a party. The experience from fighting while part of a party jumps by 10% and can either be set to be divided by level of members or assigned strictly to whoever gets the kill. Naturally, healing classes don’t do much killing, so if you have some healers in your group it’s advisable to split the xp, otherwise, you can just all form up a nice party and go solo mobs on your own while still getting a party bonus.

Overall, the game is pretty addictive and I think I may keep it around for a few more days of intensive grindfest “review”

p.s. Since I wrote the review I have discovered that there is indeed a way to change the screen resolution and a way to play in full screen mode. In fact, the technique is documented in the /help system. Specifically, the game’s installation directory contains two executables. The first is the game launcher and the second is a configuration utility. Here, you can set your screen resolution, colour depth, and the option to go into full-screen mode. There are also some audio settings there if you want to tweak those.  Be sure to exit the game fully before starting the configuration utility or you won’t see the effects after you save the changes.