Seed: Open Beta Week

[schizoslayer]

Starts today! Although if you didn't sign up before the 24th you won't get a key.

I'm currently waiting for their webserver to come back up so I can download the client. Can't wait though. If it stands up to all their claims it will be great.

If it's just an MMO that only has crafting and sod all else it'll be a bit shit.

http://www.seedthegame.com

[mouselock]

Starts today! Although if you didn't sign up before the 24th you won't get a key.

I'm currently waiting for their webserver to come back up so I can download the client. Can't wait though. If it stands up to all their claims it will be great.

If it's just an MMO that only has crafting and sod all else it'll be a bit shit.

http://www.seedthegame.com

Well hey, that's useful to know! :P

"Hey.. the open beta of something starts today. Of course, if you hadn't heard of it and already signed up, you can't check it out. But the open beta starts today, so have fun checking it out!"

[Backov]

Ya no shit. Thanks dude.

[Stroker Ace]

So uh, what's seed?

[TheWombat]

It's a sci-fi sort of MMO with, as far as I can tell, no combat but a lot of user-driven story content involving competition among colonists in this, um, seed ship or something on an alien world. A Tale in Outer Space I guess.

[BobJustBob]

One of those PC gaming magazines I bought recently mentioned some upcoming MMOG like this. I guess it had to be this one because, really, how many upcoming non-combat MMOGs can there be?

Anyway, it sounded pretty neat.

[Jab]

Oh yeah checked it out online, then completely forgot about it.

[quatoria]

Thanks for letting us know just after it was totally impossible for us to do anything about it! Please be sure to come back and let us know about more opportunities we've missed in the future.

[Stroker Ace]

If this thread had some NDA talk it would really lend an air of excitement. C'mon!

[BobJustBob]

So it's a closed open beta. Nice.

According to the site (which is now back up) the game goes live next Tuesday, and the client will be free (with a 14-day free trial). So the heads-up wasn't quite completely useless, putting it back in the "probable viral marketing" category.

[Drastic]

I got in the open closed beta, or the closed open beta. The "hey, you got in" email is full of caveats about having realistic expectations of things basically being unfinished and only a small fraction of what's intended for full game, etc.

It probably doesn't bode well for the launch being when they say it is, unless they meant May 2 in 2007.

[schizoslayer]

I got in the open closed beta, or the closed open beta. The "hey, you got in" email is full of caveats about having realistic expectations of things basically being unfinished and only a small fraction of what's intended for full game, etc.

It probably doesn't bode well for the launch being when they say it is, unless they meant May 2 in 2007.

I think they're only talking about one area out of the whole game that won't be open at launch anyway. Although until this torrent finishes nobody shal lknow!

There is also no NDA as such. So I shall be keeping some kind of running commentary on my experience.

So Far: The patcher is shit! It's one of those evil patchers like SoE and NCSoft use for their games. The kind that take FAR LONGER than if they had just made an installer and slung it up on an ftp server somewhere with a nice little torrent.

When will they learn? By all means verify my files but manual patching is ALWAYS the better way.

[Drastic]

So Far: The patcher is shit!
I think it's slow enough that it's actually making my computer's clock reverse. Is it throttled at dialup speeds or what?

Yes yes, I know their servers are getting beaten on right now. Cry me a river, Runestone!

[schizoslayer]

I think it's slow enough that it's actually making my computer's clock reverse. Is it throttled at dialup speeds or what?

Yes yes, I know their servers are getting beaten on right now. Cry me a river, Runestone!

It's not throttled at all it's just everybody is patching and the game is so low budget they couldn't afford adequate bandwidth.

There's a torrent link at the site you got the patcher from. Tis Mucho faster.

[schizoslayer]

I'm in! And... well. Oh dear.

Not the greatest start to an open beta that's ever been seen. On top of that I'm beggining to question the point of the game after having encountered the reality of it.

In my mind it was supposed to be a dynamic community of people seeking survival on a harsh planet for a common goal.

To a point this is true. In that this is ALL you will do. Seek to survive. Now unless they actually do some A Tale in the desert style things all there is to do aside from chat and emote a bit with people (Not the things roleplaying was made of you can't even emote your own text like you can in irc) is to repair the tower. Constantly. Why? Because that's what you do. It's got about as much point to it as Planetside did. "We're keeping this world in a perpetual state of peril but whenever you repair something it doesn't actually do shitall to the world."

I hope it gets better than this, the hugely limited ways to interact not just withthe world but with your own character and everybody around you is in a way the anti-emergence. Hell you can't even purposefully sabotage the project and generate a little tension. Not that anybody would notice in a place where everything is consistently breaking down anyway.

On the plus side I quite like the art style.

[Drastic]

This is quite possibly the most amusing free game experience I've ever had. I'm pretty sure it's not intended to be, though. All of the humor relies entirely on keeping in mind that the game launches in one week. "The game launches in one week" should really be viewed as the key thing here, sort of the cymbal rimshot for every part of it. It makes it hilarious.

So I download the data files via the torrent, since the patch server doesn't have the bandwidth to allow the closed open beta audience to patch at greater than, I don't know, 1 byte a second? Delete the checksum file in the game directory, slap the relevant data in the patch where it's supposed to go.

The launcher then freezes at a certain point, most likely because it still has to confirm with patchserver that no new files need to be downloaded, and the patchserver doesn't have the bandwidth to allow the closed beta population to do that all at once either. The way it seems to work is that every time you launch the launcher, you get a random chance to get a sufficient share of the bandwidth to send the one or two packets needed to confirm that the client-side file situation is copacetic. It's sort of like farming a mob for a rare drop, only as step one.

But eventually you get that rare drop of the patchserver and you exchanging confirmation packet, and the game launches by opening two more windows and sitting there for a minute or two. Then comes the character-select-or-create menu. Create a new character!

The character creation screen is actually functional. Given what's transpired so far, this arouses my suspicion. It's quiet, too quiet. The look of your character is rather limited. Also, everyone in the world of Seed has freakishly large feet. But again, functional. I make up some name. I don't see anywhere to click to continue (I discover why later, stay tuned!) and hit return experimentally. The client throws an error message and freezes.

Right! Kill the windows, this program is not responding, end now, no I don't want to tell Microsoft about this problem. I think I erred by also closing the launcher, but it reinforced the learning experience by having me farm for a patchserver drop again. Reinforcing learning is how you get it to stick, so that's good.

This time, the character creation screen seems like it's frozen. None of my mouseclicks are doing anything. Then I discover that my pointer isn't actually the tip of the cursor arrow this time; it seems to be reading a pixel at about pointer's center-of-mass as the arrow. Onward!

I create another character, name it, avoid the enter key. I look thoughtfully at the screen, then inspiration hits--the client's running in a window. I hide my windows taskbar, and there's the button I need. I click it and wait, and after a minute or so, there's my character, alone in a hallway. I spin the camera around him and learn that its distance doesn't adjust if there's walls in the way, you just stop seeing anything then. This seems an odd design choice for a corridor-intensive environment, but bear in mind I'm just a consumer and not an industry insider.

In a chat pane, various people are smiling warmly and waving hello at everyone and someone's asking something in what I think is in Spanish. I can almost read it (yo conozco un poco espanol) but it's not really Spanish Spanish. Rather, I think it is, but...okay, look--we all know how badly people in online games type when English is their native language? Right, they type just as badly when they speak anything else. I realize I'm not the only person in the corridor, but rather one of an indeterminate stack of conterminous people all occupying the same space, with perhaps our atoms' vibrational frequency such that we don't undergo nuclear fusion, sort of like the Flash if he never actually ran anywhere and instead just fidgeted. The newbie zone is more of a newbie tile where everyone goes.

I click on a spot down the corridor, vaguely intending to move there. Nothing happens for a few beats, then about a dozen people fission from the one figure visible. Then the client crashes.

I say to myself, not for the first time and quite cheerfully, "the game launches in one week," and cackle. I expect to think "one week" occasionally and start snickering off and on over the next few days, and the hell of it is, I'm not going to be able to explain why to anyone who wonders.

Those of you who got pissed off at schizo and feeling cheated out of the open closed beta experience maybe ought to not feel too badly about that, is what I'm saying.

One week!

[Piemax2]

"I realize I'm not the only person in the corridor, but rather one of an indeterminate stack of conterminous people all occupying the same space, with perhaps our atoms' vibrational frequency such that we don't undergo nuclear fusion.."

Heh! So that's the trick, is it?

[stusser]

awesomeness Nice! For your next assignment, you will try a bizarre disturbing paedophilic massively multiplayer underage jap dating sim, something like yogurting (http://www.yogurting.jp/). And take screenshots this time, with clever ironic captions, as you roleplay a fat bald german tourist with sweaty grasping hands!

Yes, it's really named yogurting.

[worm]

Since I can't play I'm going to guess that it's Sociolotron(which I haven't played) without any rape or fucking.

[Drastic]

Yes, it's really named yogurting.
I'm...not certain what to think about that. I can't decide whether I'm relieved or disappointed that the page doesn't seem to have an engrish version.

By random clicking, I found some screenshots on it, all of which seemed to involve vaguely child-like figures standing in the kind of poses children might stand in if rigor mortis was something you got when you were in grade school, instead of when you were at a certain level of decomposition after dying. Plus, they all seemed to be staring out of the screen at you.

Ever since seeing this Supercar video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23cTROHGkIc&search=Supercar) my first instinct when a vaguely childlike rigormortis figure is staring at me with freakishly huge eyes is to duck and run serpentine for the nearest exit, in hopes of avoiding the inevitable attack with disintegration gaze attacks.

[stusser]

Don't watch the promo video (http://dl.yogurting.com/preopen/yotingmovie.html) drunk.

Note: if prone to epilepsy, you will probably swallow your tongue, so just like, be ready for that.

[TriggerHappy]

I really really want to try the beta now, that writeup was hillarious. I'm still giggling over the concept of a 'newbie tile'.

[jpinard]

I really really want to try the beta now, that writeup was hillarious. I'm still giggling over the concept of a 'newbie tile'.

Hehe, me too.

[skyride]

I'm not totally sold yet. Someone tell me why I should get this game.

[BobJustBob]

Because everyone else is doing it. You want to be cool, don't you?

[Old Man Gravy]

What, can't you read, fruitcake? Because it launches in a week.

Oh, and Newbietile.

[bwiltgen]

Reminds me of the Tale in the Desert 2 beta where my avatar was a pink cube for the first 4 hours or so because the server didn't have enough bandwidth to stream the actual model to me during that time. I actually started to believe that I was some sort of symbolic egyptian god (Lord of Bright Geometry!), and got a little let down when all of a sudden my cube turned into a person.

This may be a dumb question, but why do game companies do non-NDA open betas when their game/hardware is so drastically underdeveloped? I realize the true point of a beta is to "test" the game, but these wonky experiences being reported are not at all going to help the game be successful when it's released... in a week.

[Drastic]

Update: I managed to get into the actual game a total of one more time, in order to see if I could progress beyond the newbie tile. I think I did, but it's hard to say.

When I logged in, I was suspended in a blank, off-white void. It was the Matrix loading construct, unfurnished. Rather peaceful, really.

As I waited there expecting a corridor to appear around me, I poked around the various buttons and found the user settings menu. I had the intent of switching the game to fullscreen instead of windowed, because I don't like my taskbar on autohide mainly. I find the graphics options pane. It's as blank as the area my character stands in. In the future, options can only lead to confusion.

I killed the windows about five minutes later.

Six days!

[Old Man Gravy]

Just from the description on the website, it sounds like that's not too terribly different from the intended experience, Drastic.

When I read the bullet points about the "gameplay", it seemed like you could:

1. Stand around doing not much of anything
1a. Fix stuff (which in my imagination means going to a specific spot where the Fubgrifter is in disrepair and then maybe clicking a button but otherwise not doing much of anything)
2. Not do quests
3. Not get into combat
4. Craft (making, I dunno, stuff for everyone else who's standing around doing not much of anything)
5. Take a poll of other players who probably aren't doing much of anything
6. Get elected Administrator (Of The Office Of Not Doing Anything, presumably)
7. Join a 'Ring' of other players who are standing around not doing... well, you know

But the art looks cool.

[Drastic]

It's a nice backstory, actually. But yeah--there's a "how to repair stuff" guide on the forums for those hypothetical players who might log all the way in, and it seems that making repairs consists of equipping the proper tool and clicking a button...and then watching a repair meter fill up while also keeping an eye on the tool's wear-and-tear damage meter.

Were I not so amused by it all, I might be befuddled why they didn't choose to make one of the central activities, I don't know, interactive. Do the Puzzle Pirates thing perhaps, and have themed puzzles that you have to play to make repair progress. It'd be a neat wrapper for a new The Incredible Machine-a-like--again, in the subjunctive universe where the game could load and play.

[Drastic]

Oh hey, for those of you whose jealousy burned bright at missing the gloriousness that was the Seed openclosed beta, they've now launched! You can sign up for a free two week trial, but be vigilant lest your card be charged on the fifteenth day. But you would get two months for the price of one if you let that happen!

Strangely, my experiences have me leaning to not doing that. I think I've derived more than enough satisfaction from the game already.

[BobJustBob]

So who's going to be the guinea pig? I vote not me.

[RepoMan]

I also vote not me.

Where's Family Circus when you need it? "Who played Seed during launch week?" "Not me!" "Not me!" While the Not-Me Invisible Doughboy runs away smirking....

[Lee Johnson]

You've gotta be kidding! Every time I tried to log in last week, I couldn't--except once. And then, the lag was so bad, I was basically rooted in place, unable to go anywhere or do anything. I was never actually able to play the game.

Most of the time, I never got past the program launcher. :-/