Review | Love

At first sight…

Format: PC | Genre: MMO | Publisher: Quel Solaar | Developer: Quel Solaar | Release date: 26/03/10 | RRP: €10/m

Solo-created MMO LOVE released last week. Andrea Varotsis explores its strange, unique online world.

Love is new – really new. I don’t just mean it’s just been released, or that it’s original or untested, although all of those things are true. More importantly though, it’s untouched, pristine, like a fresh fall of snow waiting for a footprint. There are no decent Wikis, no complete instructions, walkthroughs or podcasts: for now, it’s a few players and a Teamspeak server versus the world.

And what a world – the screenshots that adorn these pages may look like impressionistic paintings that I’ve retrieved through some artistic time-vortex, but even they fail to do the game justice. From the pastel hues of its oceans, to the enigmatic blue night skies peppered with stars, to the polar ice caps and sprawling plains, Love is a beautiful creation: a virgin world, like some mysterious gaming Garden of Eden, littered with an array of stunning creations from cavernous underground cavities to glistening glaciers and everything in between. It’s not the features that’ll amaze your gamer psyche though, but how they’re created.

Unlike World of Warcraft or Ultima, Love’s world isn’t set in stone. Instead, it shifts and turns, molded and sculpted by time – it’s entirely procedurally generated. Think NetHack, but in 3D: every server is built on the same code, but each emerges from its primordial cyber-putty-ooze with its own flavour, features, and landmarks. With each world-changing flood, each artillery impact and each player footstep, the environment is altered – and that makes Love more permanent than all the rest of the MMO ilk. Where Warcraft plays through the same tale for every hero and adventurer, forcing them through scenario after scenario and tale after tale, their ever-strengthening character the only mark of their progress on the world, in Love, your character never really changes – but you’ll leave the world around you marked by your passage. At least, when you figure out what the hell you’re meant to be doing.

I guarantee you, that’ll take awhile. I spent my first five minutes in Love lost – impressed, definitely, but also very much lost, and hopelessly confused. Thankfully, my instincts have been honed by years of being lost, and within minutes, I’d found a wiki, a manual, and an official Teamspeak server; a wiki that had all of ten incomplete and confusing pages, a manual that wasn’t much more help, and a Teamspeak server full of people who were just as confused as I was.

Love grows

So, I was lost – but I was lost with a purpose, and with friends, which is always better than being lost by yourself, because at least you can make fun of everybody else’s efforts. The beauty of the Internet’s collective intelligence, however, has yet to fail me – and sure enough, within minutes, we’d found a Monolith: the heart of any settlement in Love. Our home had been plonked down unceremoniously in the center of an ominous if strangely promising clearing, covered in a scattering of atomic-green trees, and before long one of our pioneering expedition had landed upon a token. In Love, tokens are buildings, packaged into compact little boxes that litter the crayon-coloured landscape, and each of them allows you to construct a new type of structure around your Monolith.

Within minutes, our base had begun to take shape, spreading from our Monolith like a mountain of disorganised furniture. Each Token we brought back to the base extended our reach further by granting us a new tool. One of our explorers returned with dive gear, while another brought us the gift of radio communication, allowing us to shout obscenities across vast distances. And I bought back the holiest of the holies, the HyperBlaster, which was a default Blaster, but more Hyper. We all assumed that was a good thing.

Continues…

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