A shocking discovery. The Delayed Facepalm...

[Nogetsu]

I was having a gander through my old PCPowerplay Australia October 2008 Magazine today. Reading though the old info of games now becoming Forgotten. Looking at their Hidden MMO's and Garage Game sections for new games to try out when I discovered something that I had read long ago and had passed it over without a second thought...

It was an MMO whos main goal was not that of 'phat' Loot and Epic Amours and Weapons, Killing the next guy for the EXP Grind. But that of something different. A game which could be referred to as Civilization Goes MMORPG. A game where you as a character start out as a simple person that barely has enough skill to collect clay and sand with his bare hands, and you build his skills up to learn how to make pottery and craft different Items untill you have enough skill to build a boat and travel to the Mainland of Egypt...

It never clicked before but, Haven and Hearths Style has been done before. I was shocked as I read it today, thinking that only last year did I say that would be stupid and boring to play. This game is known as 'A Tale in the Desert'. It even has a Wiki entry...

A Tale in the Desert (ATITD) is a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) set in Ancient Egypt, run by the independent company eGenesis. Most notably, the central focus of the game is, unlike most other MMORPGs, society rather than combat: in fact, this game is one of very few in the genre to boast no combat system whatsoever. Instead, the focus of the game is economic development.

It was made all the way back in 2003 and has been developed and reworked over four times, the most recent being December 13, 2008...

[CG62]

bear hands

Oh wait, you're NOT a bear? Fuck, then my dream of grinding my fishing skill so I can catch salmon with my MOUTH is ruined.

[Nogetsu]

bear hands

Oh wait, you're NOT a bear? Fuck, then my dream of grinding my fishing skill so I can catch salmon with my MOUTH is ruined.

Out of all that, you are making fun of a simple mistake??? Gee...

[Delamore]

The two other MMOs like Haven are Wurmonline and ATITD

ATITD does not have any actual attacking, but has some interesting conflict that the dev fuels with how he designs the game
For example, to "level up" you do tests, one of the tests is to build the largest obelisk in an area of a material and it has to stay for 2 days or something. So if someone builds one bigger than yours while yours is waiting the 2 days, welp you have to build a new one. Oh and it works on largest ever, so the goons built one 60 cubits tall when the current height of our region was 12, so everyone else had to build 60+.
Crafting in ATITD is the most polished out of the 3 games with most crafts having some sort of minigame involved, alot like cheese and fishing in Haven for example but normally more complex.
Smithing was one of the best, you hammered a piece of metal into shape, you could hit it X amounts of times with X going up with better metal types. Different tools would allow you to hammer different depression types, the closer to the goal you got the higher quality it was.
ATITD uses a system in which the game is "won", it has been won three times so far and is now on the forth tale. To win the community has to work together towards goals or things just happen. I know one of the tales had a huge thing about meteors coming down and wrecking shit and was going to have a full blown end of the world thing going over the pollution the players had wrought on the world.

Big problem with ATITD is boredom comes alot earlier as combat is not the glue that keeps everything together.

Wurmonline is more like Haven, although you're given two options the "Wild" server which is PVP but you're forced into one of 3 kingdoms which are supposed to be against each other and the mechanics work to make interkingdom warfare not work very well. "Freedom" is the non-PVP server with no PVP, theft or any other crimes, the sandbox server basically.
Wurm uses a quality system like Haven, but most of the games items can be improved further after creation, you might need to polish a sword with a pelt, sharpen it with a whetstone, add some more iron or temper it in water to improve it further. There are alot more skills too, while alot are useless (Milking,milling and a few others) there are still alot of interesting skills and they all increase through use rather than spending XP of some kind.

The big problem with Wurm is that the community is terribly abrasive and elitist and the GMs/mods come from this community, the game is unbalanced (Only factors in due to differences between kingdoms leading to unbalanced PVP) and the $ for ingame currency economy which causes alot of issues in keeping the economy alive.

[Loopoo]

Delamore, is ATITD a nice game? The only thing that is a turn-off for me is the monthly subscriptions. I can pay it, it's just that I don't play that often, so I feel it would be a waste.

Is there any sort of trial? And if you guys got some sort of guild up, i'd love to join it.

[Delamore]

Delamore, is ATITD a nice game? The only thing that is a turn-off for me is the monthly subscriptions. I can pay it, it's just that I don't play that often, so I feel it would be a waste.

Is there any sort of trial? And if you guys got some sort of guild up, i'd love to join it.

There is a 24 hours ingame trial, the goon guild in it is mostly gone.
It's a fun game, the only problem I had with it was the balance between nothing unlocked and everything there. If you joined early on you'd have to wait quite a while for the community to unlock certain crafts and if you joined late game you'd have everything you ever wanted already.

[CG62]

bear hands

Oh wait, you're NOT a bear? Fuck, then my dream of grinding my fishing skill so I can catch salmon with my MOUTH is ruined.

Out of all that, you are making fun of a simple mistake??? Gee...

No.

A bear MMO would be awesome.

[hpmons]

When I started this game my first thought was of ATITD.

I never paid for it (just did the 24hr trial twice), but it seemed fairly decent.

[Lightning4]

Worst part of Wurm to me was the crafting system. It really was one of the worst kind of grinds when it came to improving shit. Progress bars ahoy.
Mining was a pain in the ass too, but acceptable since you're, you know, not really supposed to do it solo

It's not terrible, but other annoyances eventually drove me and my friends away.

[Delamore]

Worst part of Wurm to me was the crafting system. It really was one of the worst kind of grinds when it came to improving shit. Progress bars ahoy.
Mining was a pain in the ass too, but acceptable since you're, you know, not really supposed to do it solo

It's not terrible, but other annoyances eventually drove me and my friends away.

I found the issue wasn't the progress bars, but the menus to access them.
At least now you can hotkey tons of shit.