If you were to really look at my sidebar under my “Previous Travels”, you’d see Project Entropia listed. That is a Science Fiction MMORPG set in the future. I was in there for about a month in 2004 (total noob, I was) and then gave up due to all the noob hunters and how hard it was to just make some in-game cash.
Fast forward 3 years.
Sometime back in July 2007, apparently the whole MMORPG underwent a major overhaul. They licensed the CryEngine by CryTek, the same engine used in the game Crysis. The CryEngine includes physics, so I guess Mindark, the makers of Entropia, decided to upgrade to the new Engine. If you’re a DX10 user (ie running Vista) you will enjoy the same (or similar) kinds of breathtaking graphics you can see on Crysis.
That was basically what drove me to re-download the whole client again, all 1.3GB of it. Back in 2004 it was just 700MB… it has doubled in size since. It took me about 4 hours or so (I forget, I was watching TV and/or playing Hellgate while it was downloading in the background) to get it all down.
The first impression – wow. Graphics definitely have improved. Since I couldn’t access my old character, I had to create a new one. My new guy doesn’t have the old Orange Jumpsuit anymore. Now, noobs get a nifty desert-camo kinda jumpsuit. Looks better.
They haven’t changed the controls much since 2004 though. The way to run, jump, aim, and use mouse cursor are basically the same as I remembered them. I also start back at the arrival terminal outside the city of Port Atlantis.
What *is* different now, is that at the arrival terminal, they now have real human players Guiding new arrivals! I happen to meet a nice and helpful guy designated as Guide 03 Simon, and he kinda helped me refresh my hazy memory of how the game worked.
The noob activity, “Sweat Gathering”, was something I never did back in 2004. I happened to bump into a couple of players back then and we “hunted” together. This time around tho, I was alone, totally alone. So, now I had the freedom to explore on my own.
And, I was rudely reminded of how dangerous the world of Entropia is. Shortly after stepping out of the city gates, I ran across a familiar animal (now with better graphics and textures!), and the first attack he did on me took out 1/4 my health bar! I had to remember how to run, in a hurry! Ok sweat gathering is gonna be trickier than I thought.
Somewhere kinda NW from Port Atlantis, there’s a place called “The Stable”. I met a kinda high-level player called Melissa, who gave me a pet for FREE. It’s cool considering that Entropia’s economy is “real”, ie people use real cash to buy virtual goods, like how they do it in 2nd Life or There. A bit further NW of that is a small outpost, and in-between the Stables and the outpost, heaps of animals where we can gather sweat.
This is probably a goldmine, and there are loads of other players in the same location gathering sweat too. The thing about working in such large numbers is, we get to see nature’s defenses at work here – Safety in numbers. The animals do not know which one of us to attack, so while it’s attack one of us the rest had our Mindforce targetted on the animal and are gathering sweat up.
It also appears to be an unwritten understanding there, that the people at the outpost will help the people out there gathering sweat. Help, as in sometimes tanking an animal, or the medics will run around and heal the gatherers. There’s no “kill-stealing” or ninja-looting since loot is locked – only available to the player(s) who killed the animal. Gathering sweat off an animal being killed is also apparently not frowned upon. It’s probably because sweat and loot are different so players don’t mind if another player is gathering sweat off an animal they’re hunting.
All in all, I’d say this time around the experience was more positive. Players are now friendlier, and I overheard someone saying that now, PvP are only allowed in PvP zones. Good riddance! I hate getting killed for no reason other than because I’m new.
I think I will probably start to spend more time in Entropia…
