Started A Tale in the Desert the other night.

I love what they're trying to do (and by all accounts, what they're managing, to some extent).

It's a non-combat game, mostly resource-gathering and crafting. The community cooperates in working toward large-scale goals, with space for individuals, guilds and regions competing as they do so. It has some interesting innovations, such democratic law-making that gets enforced by the code itself in a subsequent update.

It's one of those games that I really want to love, but I suspect it's too niche even for me. Unfortunately (or fortunately, and I'm in a quandary as to which should go first in this sentence) most of its flaws are things that could and should have been avoided relatively easily.

First thing I found was that rather than an explicit tutorial there was just a checklist of things I needed to do to prove myself worthy of citizenship. I started my customary fiddling with the interface, managing immediately to hide that list so that I couldn't get it back.

When I had arrived, someone welcomed me. Another player, I assumed, perhaps an officially sanctioned mentor-type. I missed it initially, but as he gave up and signed off the private chat window he'd left me instructions of how to find it again. Once I'd exhausted the options I could find I asked him how to bring back the checklist; he didn't know, but once I did found out I was able to tell him so that he could help the next person to make that mistake. (It had been an option I'd already tried once or twice, but that had only made the difference I needed when a different part of the interface was in the right state.)

So, with the checklist back I started to work down it. Mostly it was pretty self explanatory; an annoying amount of running around followed by some curious resource-gathering, some strange crafting, lots more running around, and so on.

The main issues its got are with the interface, both the actual GUI bits and other bits of the me-game communication.
  • Slate is picked up from near water, when the correct icon appears at the top of the screen. I can see no other indication of this, so you run around, inevitably pass over a slate spot and have to retrace your steps until the icon comes back.
  • It would be nice to be able to see the costs of learning things without trekking all the way to a school. Or if it's intended to be the kind of game where I keep notes, give me a way of doing so in-game.
  • Camera movement by mouse only is probably an accessibility issue. Just an annoyance for me, thankfully, but it could have gone horribly wrong on my two-monitor set up.
  • Lack of routefinding is a shame.
  • The map is of such a scale that you can barely make anything out: you can hide quite a lot under the 'you are here' arrow. Make it zoomable, please?
I probably have more, but you get the point.

This is a lovely idea for a game, a concept that appeals to the kind of people who see past dated graphics and enjoy the gameplay and the community. It's also been around for a while, proving that there are enough of those people to sustain it (even out of those who have found it despite the relative underground status and stayed despite the initial experience), but while I'm sure these people aren't motivated primarily by the money I can't believe they wouldn't want to show the game they no doubt love to more people.
Such an obtuse interface (and a few other things that could be improved in the early-game experience, for relatively little effort) will keep in firmly in the domain of the sandbox non-combat hardcore, which I think is a great shame.


One huge plus point: The free trial is '24 hours', that as far as I can tell is of in-game time. That's genius: you need to make sure prospective players get enough time to find good things in the game, and to feel belonging and entitlement. Look and learn, Cryptic.