T w e n t y S i d e d

Let’s do something new. I watched a video months ago of someone trying free MMORPG’s on Steam, and this was one of the few that actually scored highly. It is, to be clear, a mobile game that’s also available on PC. Of course, so is Genshin Impact, and Honkai Star Rail, and other especially Korean MMO’s that generally pass for AAA game titles…and certainly compete with and even outdo them. But I think it will be obvious as soon as you load the character creator that Villagers & Heroes seems to occupy a place closer to those 2010’s games that were designed for mobile use, and THEN got PC versions. You know, when you blow up the graphics to an actual 1920×1080 (or bigger) monitor, the simplified textures and reduced polygons that you can’t see on a phone screen become blatant.

I have played a few of the mobile->PC MMO’s, and enjoyed them. Forsaken World: Gods and Demons is particularly well done, and enjoyable. But also isn’t that long. I beat the game in just a few weeks. And last I heard, it hasn’t added new content in a couple of years. Like most, it was also click-to-move, click-to-attack, and so on. Automatic combat, very little character customization, fixed progress, etc. I haven’t played the mobile version of Villagers and Heroes, but the PC version plays like almost any other PC MMORPG. I had my Razer Nostromo programmed for Star Wars: The Old Republic and the movement and jump controls were mapped to the same keys. (No shock there, actually…it’s W-A-S-D and Spacebar.)

But back to character creation. This isn’t the Unreal Engine, but you have a selection of choices on par with, say; World of Warcraft. In fact, this game feels like an alternate take on WoW, and I’m not the first to say that. The creator first prompts you for a name, but you don’t actually have to choose one to move on. You can either click on “General” under background or, if you’ll notice, the bottom right corner of the “notebook” is rumpled. If you move your mouse to any empty area along the edge of the notebook, or down to that corner, it will “lift up” indicating you can flip to the next page. The “General” tab allows you to adjust your overall body size; really just height. This is a slider. You can pick, if I remember correctly, 28 options for skin color. Lastly, you pick a default “pose” from 8 choices. I went with “fearful.” “Origin” is solely about what country in the world you are from, which, best I can tell, only assigns which crafting items you start the game with. That’s right; crafting is a HUGE component of Villagers & Heroes. “Face” and “Hair” allow you to fine tune those options; usually with anything from 9 to 30 choices.

“Class” has you pick one of 5 classes: Warrior, Wizard, Hunter, Priest, and Shaman. “Gear” actually refers to a specialization or sub-class for each. In my case, I chose “Priest” and then “Shadow Priest.” I’m sure calling it “Gear” might make sense for some of the other classes, but the Priest comes with a Mace and a Shield no matter what…only the spells change. And that finishes out the “Heroes” part of the game. Now on to the “Villagers” part. Here, you pick which skills to boost by one to start out. I chose tailoring, botany, and bug lore. Hits pretty close to home, actually. You also get to pick your basic house design; I went with “Spooky.” You can actually see what I presume will be my house at some point just behind me in this screenshot:

And, of course, it was all worth it for the character description, although I’m sure everyone who makes the same basic choices gets the same thing in the end:

“Clad in dark robes, Abella Broderick is a fearful priest who dreads combat, and often her own shadow. She is prone to suffering from debilitating panic attacks which often render her quite useless on hunting parties.”

This is, so far, a very pretty game. Again, like World of Warcraft, the world aesthetic is cartoony, and only slightly more technical and polished than WoW. Sure the loading screens look nice…you would expect anything made recently to AT LEAST have decent loading screens. But once you load into your introductory quest line in Elwynn Elden Forest, you certainly feel like you’re on familiar ground.

Clicking on your first quest giver reveals the next surprise: they are fully voice-acted. And well-performed, to boot; this isn’t someone recording the department secretary reading lines from a printed email. The first quest is to just meet the quest giver in the next clearing. As you approach that location, a wolf appears so that you can have your first combat encounter. You can right-click to engage with your weapon, and/or activate skills with the number keys. Once again, a mechanic every player of classic MMO’s will find intuitive. Upon defeating the wolf, the quest giver will reward you with an upgraded weapon (that has the same name as your current weapon, at least in my case.) However, it introduces a game mechanic I’ve seen before: this new weapon has a rune inscribed that gives me a new spell for my skill bar. That was my understanding of what was going on, anyway.

And that’s as far as I got so far. I am actually really looking forward to doing a lot more in this game. Based on the video I watched, after completing the introduction I will be sent to start building my house for the “Villagers” half of the game. So look forward to that.

I’m almost done with Galactic Season 7 in SWTOR. Probably three more weeks to finish the rewards levels. I did want to point out something I have mentioned before: the difference between the original NPC Nautolans and the player character models:

My Smuggler, Nuleen, on the right; is lined up PRECISELY with the NPC Nautolan Lorul. You can see my right arm is actually merged with her left arm. The NPC body is clearly the same model but scaled up slightly on the NPC. The biggest difference is obviously the head. NPC Nautolans’ heads are scaled up I would guess around 50%, which changes the entire perception. The general reason given by the developers for why certain species are considered for player choices, and why they are built the way they are, is so they don’t have to redo any animations. That is, if you have a body type 1 female interacting with another character, only “one” animation is used for all “species.” So all the various contact or visual points have to line up. Which makes sense, sure; except for one big problem: at any given moment, the rendering engine goes kooky and doesn’t display the interaction correctly ANYWAY. It’s a bit “cart before the horse,” or some pithy saying more pertinent.

That’s it for this week, folks. I’ll be doing a lot of cooking this week, and hopefully I can share some of that. And I think I’ll spend a good amount of time in Villagers & Heroes. Be kind to each other!

Paige Francis He/him