When I signed up for the alpha version of Love, I wasn't really expecting much. It cost me two hundred and eighty seven pennies for thirty days worth of playtime. 8 hours later... I kind of wish I was still playing instead of writing this blog, to be honest.
LOVE
Love is a procedurally generated MMO.
Its a lot of things - First Person Shooter, Adventure Game, Real Time Strategy, Sim - but what it mostly is is minimalist. The game world isn't particularly huge, but because the game pretty much randomly generates and warps the landscape on the fly, you are never short of places to explore. It's more meaningful than just raising and lowering the horizon - say you go east and stumble across what looks like a fortress. The walls are high and imposing. You can't see any particular way in, so turn back and head someplace else. Later that day you re-stumble across the same fortress, except this time there is a bridge leading inside and someone has activated power nodes up on the battlements. You should probably go take a look. It might not be there tomorrow.
The game revolves around settlements.
There are random items scattered around the world (their distribution is sparse) called Tokens. Finding a Monolith Token is the cornerstone to building a new Settlement - around which other Tokens can be placed. The easiest way to describe how the game works is probably through a narrative:You take your shiny new Monolith and plant it not far from a PowerWell, rocks that have been scattered around the world shooting giant blue beams of energy into the sky. The placement of your monolith allows you to shape the landscape around it. Equip your Smooth Edit Tool and raise and lower the environment as you see fit - create huge walls to protect your monolith, stairs to reach the battlements and carve corridors through mountains to create underground bunkers. Once happy with your layout, venture back out into the world and collect some more Tokens. You bring them back and plant them around your monolith - a Radio Token, A Config Tool Token, and a Pavement Token. As you plant them, two more players arrive and seamlessly join your settlement. One decides to redesign the layout of the entire base, whilst the other equips a radio, informs you he will be using frequency 90.2, then bounds away. You decide to spruce up the place by placing pavement around your Monolith so that the interior begins to take the shape of a building instead of a cave. You get a message from your settlement chum via the radio, asking for the Co-Ordinates of your Power Pod. I didn't even know we had a power po- oh wait. While I was dropping the pavement into place, 5 new players have joined and have placed their tokens. I step over to the power pod and radio back the co-ordinates. A few seconds later, a beam of blue light has been directed straight into the Settlement, providing the players with Power Tokens - the currency required to build and place new objects in the base. You decide to use the influx of power to raise the entire settlement 20 blocks into the air, then carve away all the rock beneath it - now your Settlement is floating eerily on the horizon.
Players branch off, starting their own settlements. Enemies can be seen scurrying around in the distance, taking pop-shots at you if you venture too close. Someone has set up a ski-lift, so you hop on-board to see where it takes you. You find a staircase leading directly down through solid rock, elaborate sculptures on either side, and emerge into a deserted underground fortress, the remains of destroyed tokens scattered around. You take note of the clever use of Power Pylons before hastily retreating home.
Suddenly there is a burst on the radio - enemy Artillery is incoming. Explosives drop from the sky, brutally destroying the Tokens you worked so hard to collect and arrange so perfectly. Suddenly there are 20 AI enemies streaming into your base. You and your rapidly increasing community of Settlementers equip your blasters and launch a feeble counter-attack, but you are completely outnumbered. One of your friends manages to hack the incoming artillery frequency and redirect it out of the way, but it's too late - your monolith is destroyed, your forces are scattered. You die, re-spawning alone, in an uncharted desolace. Fortunately you can see a token lying just on the other side of that bridge...
Love does a lot of things excellently.
There seems to be a completely natural driving force which culminates players together in one place. The design is about as minimal as it's possible to be, whilst being completely stylised and windsweepingly beautiful. Your character is essentially 3 blurred cubes and a cape. Getting lost is a pleasure. A lack of penalty for death (other than being relocated to the last checkpoint you activated) and and instant re-spawn inside your settlement whenever you want it both go a long way to making the Settlement a buzzing hive of activity as players argue over exactly where the best place for a Tree is. The main fault of the game is in it's leniency towards freedom - your tireless hours of hard work arranging your Settlement for maximum defensive efficiency can be undone in about 30 seconds because some twat got hold of the Smooth Edit Tool and made a staircase right through your balcony - but this is countered by an overwhelming sense that everything is merely temporary, and that everything can be easily rebuilt. The game has almost been designed to be disposable. Everyone leaves with the understanding that their hard work probably wont exist anymore when they return the next morning. Bizarrely, everyone seems to have embraced this mentality.However.
This is not a finished game.
It is very much still under construction - dramatic changes are being made on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. New Tokens are being included and removed on the fly.What's most amazing is, each of the games 8 servers all began the same, and have all now become almost completely unrecognisable.
It's also fairly impressive seeing as the entire game was constructed by one man.
The screenshots don't do this game justice. You really have to see it in motion. It's utterly mesmerising.
If anyone else is interested in playing, the main site is here.
I'm playing on UK Server 1, and my randomly assigned ingame name is Sarion, apparently. Radio Frequency 90.5 ;)
Thanks For Reading
Love Sweep
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