Istarian Dragons
July 22nd, 2010So I tend to follow a Massively article called Rise and Shiny, where the columnist checks out one seldom-mentioned MMO per week, in an attempt to try out more new things, or something. This week’s game (which will get an article this weekend) is a game called Istaria. I went to their website to see if it looked interesting, and watched their little trailer. Hmm, ugly graphics, generic “evil army of undead” premise, but player-built towns are sorta interesting, I guess. I was just about to the point in the trailer where I was getting bored and about to stop it midway when they unveiled the one thing that makes the game worth looking into.
Dragons are a playable race.
Bonafide fire-breathing flying quadrupedal western-style dragons. You can have a hoard and a lair and everything.
As someone who would give almost anything to be a dragon in the real world, I immediately had questions. Can I start a dragon character right away, or by “can become a dragon” you mean that I have to reach a high enough level and then go through some kind of ascension to become one, and only the best players can be dragons as a mark of prestige (and therefore this would be too much work for me to ever achieve)? Do I have to pay extra to be a dragon? Is this game even free-to-play? I see something there regarding a 15-day trial, but someone said something about being able to play for free.
I was a little concerned about the “now works on Vista!” comment, with no mention of whether Windows 7 was supported or not. And how one of the items on their main page was a news post explaining their game’s name change over two years ago.
It took me forever to get the game installed, and while I was doing so, I checked out their payment options. It appears that there is a free-to-play option, but you’re only able to be a Human character. If you subscribe for $15 a month you can play as any race. What I don’t understand is, in a game that lets you play as a DRAGON, why you would want to be a badly proportioned dwarf for the same price as WoW. At any rate, they also have a 15-day free trial option where you can play as any race, so I made myself an account with this option.
I finally got the game installed, and tried to start up the patcher a few times, but it kept getting stuck on something, and making me look at the horribly low-quality graphics of the launcher. What is that, a 16-color scale? It’s made of gray, brown, and green, with individual pixels of each color very visible. I kept closing it and restarting it with different options disabled, and it eventually (after several hours of poking at it between Guild Wars quests) got past the patcher to the actual game.
I had a great deal of difficulty just getting from there to the character select screen. I use Comodo as my antivirus of choice, and when I start up a new program, it will pop up and ask me if I’m sure I want to allow that program to change something, usually two or three times until all of its different security options recognize the program as trusted. However, Istaria, like many programs, is on full-screen by default, and like some other programs, it is not possible to alt-tab out, since the game will merely take over again as soon as you try to leave. I even tried Ctrl-Alt-Deleting my way to the Task Manager, but as soon as I got it to open, the game went full-screen again. I ended up having to Alt-F4 my way out of the initial loading screen (it hangs there indefinitely as long as Comodo is blocking its connections), tell Comodo it’s okay, start the game back up, alt-F4 out of the game to tell Comodo the next thing is okay, etc.
All in all I didn’t even get the game up and running until around 11:30 pm, so I didn’t have a very long time to look through the gameplay itself.
I started on the character creation screen and immediately looked at the dragon, then clicked through all of the other races, judged them blocky and badly proportioned, and went back to the dragon. I am in favor of the character customization, as there were a great deal of different texture and color options for various parts of this dragon, as well as sliders for height, muscle, and fatness. Though it’s a little sad how many of the color options were bright primary colors and how few options I had for more muted accents. You can give your dragon a wide variety of different spot and stripe patterns, but the only colors available are bright, almost fluorescent, primary colors, with no options for simple white or black stripes.
I eventually went without stripes or spots, as a light blue/silver dragon (as always) and chose a character name. Though it asks you for a first name and a last name, you still have to have a unique first name. This made me sad, for Kiryn was already taken.
One thing I’ve noticed about my MMO habits: the very first time I start up a brand-new game, I immediately go straight for the options panel, and anything you put in my way to prevent me from getting to that options panel puts me into a bad mood. I want to put the game in windowed mode, turn up the graphics from the god-awful low resolution most games are set to by default (from the philosophy that people are more likely to stop playing your game if the framerate is bad than if it’s ugly?), see if the game will allow me to scale the UI up so that things aren’t teensy-tiny after switching to said higher resolution, and look over the keybindings. If the game even lets me change the keybindings.
I like looking over keybindings before I do anything else because it gives me an opportunity to change the WASD movement to something more familiar (I don’t know what’s up with games forcing me to use A and D for turning when they’re supposed to be for strafing) and it also lets me look over the possible options to see what kinds of windows they’ll expect me to open regularly.
Weird things about the keybindings in Istaria:
- When you bind a key to something that is already bound to something else, it does not unbind the other action. It merely highlights it in red and forces you to look through the list of bindings for conflicts and change them yourself.
- To unbind a key from an action, you left-click on it when it is already selected. I only discovered this after accidentally binding something to escape, then backspace, then resetting all of my keybindings accidentally by pressing the various buttons on the window (I still don’t know what the difference is between “Default Keybindings” and “Reset Keybindings” since pressing “Reset Keybindings” changed them back to what they were by default, I’m afraid to press the other button now) then searching through the help documentation until it told me what to do. Extremely unintuitive. I usually go through the keybindings and unbind all of the ones I don’t expect to be using frequently, and then return to the options menu later if I find that I do need a keybinding for that window after all. It’s like the Skills window in WoW: Why would I need a separate keybinding when I just just press C and then click the Skills tab? I don’t need to look at my skills THAT often.
- Related to #2 above, I CANNOT use my left mouse button to move the camera. I was able to bind the right mouse button to moving my character around (and the camera with it), but since left-clicking is the method by which you unbind keys, it is not possible to bind it to free camera rotate, and it most certainly does not do this by default.
- I also attempted to bind my Spellbook to P, but then when I actually pressed P later in an attempt to open my spellbook, it opened my Knowledge panel. Knowledge was the next thing on the keybindings list after Spellbook, and I did not have it bound to anything. I still don’t know how I’m supposed to open my spellbook again — the first time it opened, it was done for me automatically as part of the tutorial.
So I finally sorted out my keybindings (with the exception that I still couldn’t move the camera with left-click) and set off in the direction I was facing to talk to the nearby intro NPC. He told me a few things about how I’m one of the “Gifted” and if I want to know more about anything, there’s a book near the shrine over there. Oh, the shrine? He must be talking about that fountain-looking thing next to where I started. So I walk back over there, and start going around it, looking for some kind of book.
I found no book. Instead, I found a beetle. A very hostile beetle. I wanted to see what combat was like, so I walked up to it and clicked my “attack” button, found on a teensy tiny (no UI scaling = sadpanda) action interface that was placed in the upper left of the screen by default. I managed to find my current health and the target’s frame, hidden in tiny black boxes in the upper right corner. And my action bar (which had no skills on it) was a teensy tiny vertical bar in the lower left corner. All of these things were movable, so I crammed them all in the bottom center of the screen so that I could actually see all of my relevant info at the same time rather than all of it being spread as far apart as humanly possible. I hate it when games push all of my useful info into different corners of my 26-inch monitor. I hated it in WoW and I hated it in Guild Wars until I figured out how to rearrange my UI to actually make sense.
I thought the combat pose for my dragon was pretty neat, with my wings half-spread and my neck arched a little. Unfortunately, beetles a quarter my size seem to be the natural predators for dragon hatchlings, and I was unable to do any damage to it at all (when I finally found my combat log, it was full of “you miss” and “beetle does 5 damage to you”). It quickly overpowered me and once I had figured out where my health bar even was, it was down to 2 health, so I ran away screaming in the direction of my starter NPC, then around in some other direction, since the beetle was still following me. Eventually it stopped following and ran back to its spawn point, and I realized there was a pavilion with a book in front of me. Success!
So I interacted with the book, and it didn’t really answer any of my questions. It told me that in order to become an adult dragon and learn to fly, I needed to complete the rite of passage given by some guy (presumably also a dragon) in some town, but it didn’t tell me how to get there from where I was. So I ran through the area, trying my best to avoid the beetles that didn’t even appear on my screen most of the time until I was practically on top of them, until I found a path leading out of the starting forest into a barren mountainous passageway. I encountered a larger dragon who told me that in order to join the adventurer’s school, I needed to defeat one of the beetles in the previous area. But don’t fret, it’ll be easy if you use your breath attack!
“Breath attack?” I wondered. Thankfully, at this point, my spellbook automatically opened and showed me the (teensy tiny) icons for the various skills I had. None of which were placed on my action bar by default. I apparently have a breath attack! And a bite attack! And something called… Draconic Insight. I wonder what that does? It says it gives me a buff called Draconic Insight. Yes, but what does it DO? I tried using it, and indeed, it gave me a buff called Draconic Insight. Didn’t appear to have any effect, but I wasn’t quite sure how to open my character panel to see if it increased any of my stats. If it did, it didn’t say so in the description for the spell or the buff it caused.
So, armed with a (tiny little) action bar (that was still annoyingly vertical with no way to change it to being a more familiar horizontal) full of skills that I could use to kill beetles, I ran my little scaly self back to the forest, and hunted down some of those beetles. The first time I tried, I failed, and ended up dying, which led to a further explanation of the game’s lore reason for why you can just return from the dead (it has something to do with the fact that you’re one of the “Gifted” but still allows them to kill off story NPCs who are not similarly “Gifted”) and so after respawning at my bind point a few paces away, I went back in and tried breathing fire on the beetles again.
Success! This time I killed one! I attempted to loot it, but the game didn’t do anything when I right-clicked on the corpse, and the “gather” option in my action panel seems to be used for mining and such. Victorious, I returned to the NPC, who told me to go back and kill more beetles for a beetle horn, warning me that I might need to kill several before finding one of sufficient quality. Well, I guess I’ll have to figure out how to loot things now, eh? He also gave me a tiny brass bell that I could add to my “hoard” — I tried clicking the ? on the Equipment panel with the Hoard area to try to figure out what the gameplay purpose of the hoard was, but it didn’t even mention it in the lengthy tutorial window — it was just telling me that I could equip things, and pointing out various parts of the UI that seemed pretty obvious to me.
I returned to the beetles and killed a few, double-clicking on them to loot them this time. After killing my third one and starting to wonder how many I would have to kill until I get this quest item, I opened up my bag and actually looked at the descriptions for the (teensy tiny) items that were dropping. Turns out that bronze-colored circle with a T on it wasn’t a coin after all, but a beetle horn. Yes, that makes perfect sense. I actually had two of them. So I returned to the teacher again, and he told me how great I was and granted me enough experience to reach level 2.
At this point, the nonscaling UI was starting to give me a headache, as were most of the other parts of the game that seemed to be as confusing as possible to prevent me from having fun. It’s like the game doesn’t want me to play it. It was time for sleep.

