So, since the first playable characters came out
the devs have been working on the human player type for what seems like 3 billion years
and I'll admit that I haven't even gotten through all the levels yet
but I've been pretty impressed so far so I want to give a critical review of the current content.
Now, if this is your first time playing I definitely recommend picking one of the starting regions
with lower difficulty which I put in green here.
All the servers are getting pretty overpopulated right now so you can pick one of the yellow regions
if the recommended ones are full, but really try not to go for the areas in red
unless you really know what you're doing or you're just trying to speed run the game.
Pretty much all areas are player vs environment zones
but there are a few player vs player areas around here
and if you really wanna play in a private server you can do it over here
but the admins aren't so great and it sucks if you change your mind
because after you're there you can't leave so I'd probably give it a minute.
Okay, at the start you have to choose a race
and in the past caucasian male was definitely the most OP
but they've all became a lot more balanced in more recent patches at least in the easier starting regions.
If you look at the race perks tab there's still some nice privileges with this choice
so that's what I went with.
Okay so once you've chosen your starting region and race you have to go through a 9 month loading screen
while your character spawns and that already sounds bad what's even worse is that once you've actually spawned
you have to go through 18 levels of tutorial, the first few of which are just interactive cutscenes.
Even when you get to start moving around and interacting with the environment what kind of sucks is
that the only other users you really get to interact with are the two parent players that take you through
the start of the tutorial, and the trouble is that if they haven't advanced their parenting skill tree
you end up with a really screwed up stats for the rest of the game.
That's really just down to the RNG of who you get paired up with.
So the first few levels of tutorial really aren't so memorable but once you make it supple 5 or 6
you've usually unlocked the friendship and knowledge trees but you do have to spend around six hours
a day at a learning academy to keep leveling that up.
Okay so as you get to by level 17 or 18 you basically finish the tutorial and it turns out the first
thing you actually realise when you're done is that I had nothing to do with the rest of the game,
and it turns out the whole tutorial is pretty much designed to sell you the college or university DLC,
which is kind of overpriced for what you get but if you decide to go for it,
it can help you get a step up on free to play players in the mid game.
So the midgame itself generally takes place between around level 18 and 65
where the two biggest focuses are sustain the newly unlocked relationship-meter and generating ingame currency
which is usually denoted in dollars.
So first of all the relationship-meter.
This is the built-in drive to find a sexual companion, spend time with them and reproduce.
There's some factions where your parent players choose a companion for you
but in most of the western factions you get to choose yourself.
You might think this is a way better idea but the problem is they also have to choose you
so it might sound better on paper but make sure you think out the gameplay.
Now, when it comes to generating in-game currency,
the most common strategy is to trade your play time for dollars.
If you see most users during this process, while they're technically still actual players,
the majority of them are running scripts
so they're typically AFK and they're pretty much indistinguishable from NPCs.
So, because it's an MMO there aren't really any distinct objectives
and generally sometimes during the midgame you have to figure out what it is that you wanna do.
Some players focus on their relationship-meter, some on getting more dollars,
some on really maxing out certain skill trees and some struggle to figure it out at all.
There's no right answer really just like any other MMO,
I think your goal is to just enjoy the time you spent playing without ruining it for other people.
Hopefully when you are a higher level
you can get to the point where you enjoy helping players who might be struggling.
So when you do get to around level 65, this age should be the endgame content
but in practice it is getting later and later all the time despite the level cap remaining pretty much the same.
But nevertheless what's good here is that you generally have a pretty fulfilled relationship-meter,
your important skill trees are maxed out, you can generally spend the rest of your time exploring the map
and doing the things you wanna do.
The trouble is that at this point it can be hard to actually do those things
because you start to experience a lot of bugs with your character.
It's just because of the amount of variation of each user's programming,
you can't expect to function perfectly after so many iterations.
Around level 80 is when you start to encounter a lot of errors
until eventually the screen just turns black and your playtime is over.
A lot of users wonder what actually happens at this point but no one really knows.
Some players think you respawn, some think you only get to play once,
some even think you unlock a sandbox mode
where you can basically just play over all the good bits on a special map.
But you know, it doesen't seem to me like there's not a big difference
between before you start the game and after you finish, so don't overthink it, make the most of your playtime.
All in all, 6/10, better than ducks but worse than golden retrievers.