A Tale in the Desert

Describing A Tale in the Desert (ATITD) as a crafting game is like describing it as a game where you move your mouse and push keys on your keyboard - both are technically true and both miss the essence and the complexity of the game.

The first unique feature of A Tale is that it is A Tale, singular. There is a goal in the game, a supposedly achievable goal (it was never achieved in the betas, so no player knows for sure). The goal is to build the perfect society as evidenced by having players achieve the highest rank in the seven disciplines and building seven pyramids. Accomplishing this will require cooperation between players on an ever increasing scale as the tasks grow larger and larger in size.

Once you know about the goal, you can forget about it, or not. This is not a game about building pyramids. It is a game of being a citizen of Egypt, which happens to have the goal of building pyramids. But your particular citizen can be a trader, explorer, farmer, brick maker, jack-of-all trades, law maker, artist, fisherman, guild member, pioneer, or almost any other thing you can think of - except killer. ATITD has no combat, the only violence is slaughtering your livestock or overwatering your vegetables.

Let me go over a few standard things that gamers care about more because they can interfere with a game then because they can make a game, interface, graphics, and Code of Conduct.

My cats love the interface. They love it because almost everything is done with the mouse, so they can sit on my lap while I play. You move by pointing and clicking where you want to move to. You rotate the camera by moving the mouse to the edge of the screen. You use things by clicking on them, then selecting what to do with them from the menu with another click. You can type in numbers of things you pick up or put down, and of course you can chat.

The clicking to move is perhaps the greatest issue with the game. It is not difficult, it just seems archaic when you are used to moving by holding down mouse keys. While the point and click lacks fine movement control for your path, you do not need it. You can walk through all of the buildings and trees in ATITD. You cannot walk through water or up or down steep slopes, which makes mountains, lakes, and the Nile river the only real obstacles in the game. Point and click does make it easy to arrive where you want to. It is easy to zoom out, then click on a location in the distance and you will run directly there. Given that finesse while running is unimportant in the game the point and click is fine once you get used to it. Although "fine" is the best you can say for it.

I really like the chat system. There is one chat window with multiple tabs. You can have chat tabs for your guild or for individuals you want to talk to. This makes having multiple conversations easy, and easy to keep straight. In addition there is a system chat window. The developers frequently post what they are working on and just letting you know what is going on with the game. I have never seen a computer game before where I felt that it was a shared experience between the developers and the players, a tale told by many not just a play written by a developer that the player's walk through.

I keep seeing comments that the graphics in ATITD are not very good. I do not understand why people think this. It is not cutting edge graphics, but the trees and buildings look fairly realistic. The world is notably sparse - this is for a reason. Egypt is a strip of fertile land surrounded by desert, of course it is barren. Each tree, cactus, and rock is a resource. Finding a grove of five trees is a great thing. But if you look at a building close up you can see the detail. You can see the individual bricks in a kiln, almost every building has Egyptian paintings on it, and buildings that should move actually move. When you make a pot on a potter's wheel the pot visibly spins until it is done, then it stops. When you put wood in a kiln you can see the wood inside of it. When you put a wet clay pot in the kiln you can see it inside as well. And when the clay pot is done firing it turns brown inside the kiln. You can look around and see where and what things are. The world looks right, you feel you are there.

A very unusual thing about ATITD is the Code of Conduct. It started with very little of one. The reason is because the players vote upon the rules of the game as the game goes along. Players can write proposals for laws. If they get enough signatures for the proposal it is put up for a general vote. If it gets 2/3 "yes" votes in the general vote, it becomes a law. Now this is not just going through the motions. The developers read the approved laws. Some laws are overturned for being "illegal" - you cannot change the way things work, such as how onions grow, by passing a law. Other laws are overturned for being too vague or difficult. But most laws which are passed are actually coded into the game.

To make up examples, suppose you wanted your sculptures to stand out. You could propose a law that nothing could be built within fifty feet of a sculpture. If the law passed the developers would write that into the game, and it would become impossible for a player to build anything within fifty feet of a sculpture. Or if you got a law passed so that no one could say the word "irregardless" the developers would put in a filter to prevent that word from being said in chat.

Now frivolous laws have been suggested of course, but they seldom pass. But if a need is seen (preventing people from claiming excessive territory by building bonfires for example) the players do not have to send emails to the developers asking for something to be done. They proposed and passed a law that solved the problem how they saw fit. You don't always get the laws you want, but you cannot simply blame the devs for the CoC.

Now for the good stuff, gameplay, what you actually do.

Half the game is getting resources. This may be simply gathering them, or transforming one resource into another, or constructing a tool or building to get the resource. Grass is gathered simply by picking up grass from the ground. Water requires jugs, but otherwise you just pick up water from a lake or river. Wood requires harvesting it from trees. But canvas requires growing flax, rotting the flax, separating the flax, spinning twine, then weaving twine into canvas. And getting metal requires dowsing for minerals, then building a mine on a mineral vein, working the mine to get the ore, then refining the ore.

While this may sound tedious, and some of it is, you do not have to do much of any particular piece of it (or any of it if you are part of a guild or trade for resources), and part of the game is improving your means of production. If you make a scythe you can double the rate at which you gather grass, and if you build a greenhouse it grows grass so you can gather bundles of one-hundred at a time. Most other things such as mines can be automated if you learn the right skill and build a machine to do it.

So the game is not the same from start to finish. You progress in technology and build the tools to meet your needs. How high does the technology go? No one knows. There is for example a "deep well" that lets you drill for petroleum. But as no one has ever built a deep well, no one knows what you can do with petroleum. The world is always advancing into unknown technology. You discover, you learn, and you adapt.

I liked to make bricks. To make bricks you gather mud, sand, and straw and use them with a brick board. It takes a second to do, but then the bricks have to dry for 30 seconds or so. The trick is that you do not just wait for them to dry. If you have multiple brick boards you can be making bricks on all of them in a circle, picking up bricks as they dry and starting new ones. I can cycle through eleven brick boards at a time. I was very proud of how fast I could turn out bricks. Now we have a brick machine that churns out bricks night and day - as long as we keep it stocked with raw materials.

Then I learned to grow onions to feed our sheep. When you put an onion seed down it sprouts immediately and you water it. When it grows (and you see the onions in the ground and you see when they grow) you water it again. It grows four times and you water it four times and then you can harvest your onions. Again you do not just plant one seed at a time. I can grow five patches of onions at a time, although I cannot keep up with watering all of them all of the time. The nice thing about onions is that you cannot hurt them by overwatering them. So it is a kind of "whack-a-mole" in reverse, when they grow you water.

With flax, you plant it and it grows. Then weeds appear (again, you see yellow weeds grow amidst the green flax). If you do not weed it, the flax goes to seed. Then you gather flax seeds so you can grow more flax plants. If you do weed it, then it grows flax for you to harvest. There are two types of flax: Green Nile and Old Egypt. Old Egypt flax requires no water to grow, Green Nile requires water but grows two flax instead of one. So if you are near water you grow Green Nile, if water is scarce you grow Old Egypt.

There are many choices like that in ATITD. You can get oil by slaughtering camels, or you can get oil from flax. You can make charcoal with bonfires or with a charcoal hearth. Bonfires are easy to make and require no tending. Charcoal hearths are more efficient but require skill on the part of the player to make them work right. You actually adjust the vent, add wood, or pour on water, to regulate the charcoal hearth as it cooks. You can do it the inefficient but easy way or the more efficient but hard way.

Now a basic question of the easy way or the hard way is whether you play solo, in a small group, or in a large guild. It really depends upon whether your goals are personal or large-scale. If you want to learn to do everything on your own and build everything on your own, then you can play solo. You can do almost everything solo, although you will probably find you need to trade for some resources. If you want to be on the cutting edge of technology, advancing the sciences of Egypt and pushing towards building the pyramids, then you would want to join a larger guild. Then grass gathering, brick making, and mining would be automated for you. You could spend your time looking for gold, or making sheets of glass, or making wine or beer.

Trade is common in ATITD. I have not heard of anyone who is a pure trader, but the game seems ideal for it. Suppose you want to make glass - it requires lime which requires limestone. Limestone comes from a mine. Either you have a limestone mine or you do not, but if you have a limestone mine you do not need all of the limestone it can produce. So you have inherently a world in which people have either an abundance of a resource or a lack of a resource. The perfect situation for traders. Add to that, different resources are available in different parts of Egypt. Papyrus only grows near the Nile. Cactus is found in the desert. Rare minerals are said to be found only in Sinai and other barren places, I am not sure as some minerals and gold have not yet been found.

Exploration is another important factor in ATITD and you could play a pure explorer. Someone has to go out and find the veins of ore, marble, and limestone before anyone can build the mines. My guild needed limestone. Someone had found a vein of it and set up a dozen mines on it. They announced that they had limestone mines for sale and could practically name their price. You can literally strike it rich exploring. Finding where things are is a vital part of development in Egypt. Explorers are needed as much as workers.

Now exploration is part of the lives of workers as well. For example, you gather wood from trees. Once harvested, a tree cannot supply wood for 60 seconds. So you can gather wood more efficiently if there are several trees around so that you can cycle through them. The size of the trees also determines how much wood you get. So in gathering wood it pays to explore and find the best grove of trees you can.

Life in Egypt is not all work. There are also tests. But in Egypt tests are strictly voluntary.

There are seven schools in Egypt (many school buildings, only seven types of schools). You can take tests in each school to advance in rank. The schools include art, leadership, and conflict. The tests reflect the school and you can select schools where the tests seem fun to you. For example the initiation test for the school of art is building a sculpture. Passersby can vote whether they like your sculpture or not. Twenty positive votes and you pass the initiation. Tests for the school of conflict require that you play mini-games within ATITD against other players. And of course you have to win. People also like to play the mini-games just for fun.

In the end that is what I like about ATITD, it is fun.

It is not fun because clicking the mouse button is fun, something that is true of every game. It is fun because you become part of a growing and developing world, and because you make a difference.

The complexity of the world and your part in it is best shown through the example of fishing. There are several different types of fish to catch. Different types live in different types of water (lakes, rivers, etc). To fish you cast with your rod and see the results. The game determines if a particular spot is good for you personally - you cannot simply steal somebody else's fishing hole. In addition to the location, the quality of the fishing varies by time of day. So if you want to catch fish you cannot just go toss a line into the Nile. If you want fish you have to explore and find where you can catch which type of fish and at what time of day. Or you can trade for fish, of course.

The difference you make is partly because the game has a finite goal which will be accomplished, and partly because you really can make a contribution from the moment you start to play. If you join the largest guild and they are working on producing sheets of glass, they will need charcoal. Charcoal is made from wood, which a player ten seconds into the game can learn how to gather. I log on now, harvest my guild's five greenhouses, refill the brick machine, repair the automated mine, and in a few short minutes I have contributed five-hundred grass, three-hundred bricks, and hundreds of units of limestone to my guild. Then I work on whatever project I want, knowing I have already made a difference to the guild and to Egypt.

Some time in the future you will be able to survey the many on-line games. Most will have players standing over piles of corpses saying "I killed them." A Tale in the Desert will have a community of players looking over the pyramids saying "we built them." I plan to be one of the builders.

Review by dugfromthearth