CO: Early Start and Social Gaming

Despite battling to find time around a good friend’s visit, we managed to play a fair amount during Early Start Weekend. We both got some alts generated (I went a bit crazy with that, of course) and pushed up through the Tutorial.

We also got Zebra (Martial Arts) and Finneas (Dark) up to Lvl 12, and finished up with the second half of the Crisis in the Desert work, winging our way back to Millennium City to park.

In retrospect, we kind of blew it — we should have hopped over to Millennium City a lot earlier and dealt with the Qularr event stuff going on there, since I now recall there were Unique Prizes and Stuff that will Never Be Available Again. Oh, well. I think Margie was telling me about that, and I completely spaced.)

I did make some moderate use of the Bug feature. I like that it lets you search for terms first, identify already-reported bugs, and flag that you have that problem, too. It helps consolidate bug reporting for the support team, and lets you know that “you are not alone.” That said, it would be nice if when a bug gets closed, that everyone who reported it gets a ping.

Overall, I remain pleased with the game. There are a few interface issues that Margie and I have chatted about, though no showstoppers (and they are matched by some nice features that I already take for granted). I do think the early mission tree is going to be something of a pain — it’s not just the initial Qularr invasion tutorial, but also the initial Crisis in the Desert / Crisis in Canada mission sets. That’s a lot of repetition before you get to a broader range of play options (continue where you are in various adventure trees, return to MC, or head off to the other crisis locale). Regular players with lots of alts (ahem) are going to find it something of a grind.

From a social standpoint, I got some Friends added to my list (with invites out for a few others). Interestingly, Cryptic’s trying to make the main web page for CO, when signed in, a social hub — you can see your friends and their status, you can go into “Cryptic Space” and blog, you can look at “My Characters” and see your characters in summary and detail. You can even blog as your characters.

That said, it’s not very robust or ready for prime time as of yet. “My Characters” shows serious lag in updates (it doesn’t yet show two characters I built Saturday, and the mission list is similarly behind for characters that were in place then). It’s also unclear how to share the character list with others (or how others might see your character’s blog). I can infer it from the URLs, but I have no idea if these show up for everyone — e.g., a character stream for Zebra (which seems to include all blog entries), or my User Profile, etc.

I’m sure it’s all going to get fleshed out, or at least I hope it is. There’s a lot of opportunity for socializing the game through the website, and not having it as polished as possible at launch would be a serious error.