Note: Quite a few resized or cropped screenshots after the cut. And as Second Life is the other virtual world I’ve actually spent enough time in, I’ll be making many comparisons throughout.

Right, so, signup. Twinity is meant to be a true-to-scale virtual replica of the real world, so not surprisingly, you can link your Facebook account to it. I initially signed up with my half-real online name (Vickie Diablos), but once I discovered that we can change our name any time by editing our profile on the website, I switched back to my common virtual world name (Naomi Skosh). So far, so good.

Twinity login screen showing a spacious living room, with the words 'A Free Starter Apartment is awaiting you' on it. There *is* a starter apartment waiting for you once you complete enough steps in the welcome tutorial, but it looks nothing like the image. Nothing.

Character customisation is as expected with sliders, and there is a tool for you to try to create your real-life face from photos. I tried it with one of my Second Life avatar’s snapshots… let’s just say I decided to use the default slider tools in the end. You’ll probably have better luck with a real photo.

Create Face from Photo Tool

But, additional character problem: Other than that sex is binary in this world as with most virtual and game worlds, I noticed that there’s no way to change your sex once you’ve chosen one when you sign up. I guess I’m spoilt by Second Life.

By the way, if you created a female character and her head-tilt and creepy smile keep getting in the way of face customisation, it’s her animation. Changing it from “confident” to anything else will stop it.

Animations panel showing available dance moves, emotions, flirt & tease and so on

Speaking of animations, you are only allowed to choose from one mood at a time. So like, you can’t stand happy, walk confident and afk flirty. I find the confident stand annoying (head tilt, creepy smile), the happy walk cheesy (skipping, seriously?), the flirty walk too unnatural, and I’d rather not be blue or drunken.

Outfit options are also limited: jackets and tops share the same layer, dresses take up both the top and bottom layers, and so on; meaning that you can’t, for example, wear a jacket over a dress.

I also can’t touch any of the clothes marked for male. This is even so for supposedly unisex items in the real world, such as vehicles. Fucking vehicles. I hope I’m not the only person who thinks this is annoying and highly problematic.

Inventory showing items marked with a 'not for female' symbol on it.

Self-expressions, why you no give me more?

On to a more positive note, I do like the Achievements system of Twinity. The Twinity currency is the Global, and you can earn a few by completing the tutorial and other available achievements, such as by exploring the world on foot, attending events, making friends and so on. This is a great idea — if you’ve been on Second Life, you’ll notice that the number one question from newbies is “How do I make money in this game[sic]?”. But this is also not a good idea — Globals will be worth very little real-life money; it’ll never be like the Linden currency in Second Life.

Achievements

And they hand out a small Berlin starter apartment clone to you after you complete the welcome tutorial regardless of your account status! Speaking of which, premium and merchant accounts are still free at the moment.

But, well, the world is still in public beta. Things will change.

Oh wow, how did I completely forget to write about the controls and camera even though that’s probably one of the first things you come across? Well, the Twinity camera? One word: terrible. You can do the normal pan around, zoom-in zoom-out thing with your mouse, and you can hold the alt key and click on a person and certain items to focus on them. But that’s pretty much all there is (that I’ve discovered).

Moving the character is done by using the arrow keys by default, but you can change that to my much more preferred WASD in the settings.

Placing objects in-world is similar to what you do in Second Life, except because the camera is so limited, it’s not as easy and fun.

Placing Objects in Twinity

Despite not being overly impressed at this stage, I dragged my Second Life meal ticket SL-equivalent It’s Complicated friend with benefits significant other on to Twinity when he came online. And once he’s relatively happy with his look (there weren’t many choices for men, according to him), we went out to explore.

London in Twinity

London, more specifically, since I might recognise some of the places. Other current cities available include: Berlin, Miami, Singapore, New York.

Picnic in London, Twinity

What I found interesting is that real estate in Twinity is based on real-life streets. If you click on a building you see on the street, you can check whether they’re renting apartments out (for real-life money).

All apartments and shops I’ve come across so far are in instances. It’s super for privacy, but not so super for shops, at least in my opinion.

But yes, unlike Second Life, mirrors in this world actually reflect! As they should!

An Actual Working Mirror!

Miscellaneous bits and pieces: I found the Event system slightly confusing at first because I thought it’s based on Twinity time, but turns out there may not be a global time, only your local time. I think. I’m still not completely sure.

“Twings”, I believe, are like Facebook’s poking and MSN/Windows Live’s nudge. I twinged my friend. He twinged me back. And I twinged him again. Yeah.

This sounds totally dirty.

TL; DR Twinity itself:

• The Achievements system makes this virtual world feel like a game, which is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. (In fact, the message says “connecting to game server” when you connect to Twinity.)
• Twinity is a true-to-scale replica (or so they claimed) of the real world, so there are real-life streets and buildings, day/night cycle is 24 hours and avatars are human (adult).
• You get a small starter apartment after you complete the welcome tutorial.
• You can easily change your name by editing your profile.
• Sex is binary. Male or female. No switching.
• Non-unisex items, including some vehicles and animations, can only be used by one sex and that one sex only. No exceptions.
• Camera needs improvement.
• Avatars in semi-populated places take forever to load for me, and I’m on a decent connection and gaming computer. But yeah, I’m connecting all the way from Australia.
• I found at least one official casino. Gambling is apparently allowed here.

Visiting the/an official casino in my latest look

TL; DR Twinity vs Second Life:

• Twinity is not Second Life.
• Twinity will not replace Second Life.
• I don’t think Twinity is trying to replace Second Life, but what do I know?

I won’t be logging in to this world a lot, but when I do, I will most likely be playing the official Quiz Game (English) and earning Globals.

Quiz Game (English)

Well, I have to show off somewhere.

[Brighter and glowy screenshots are ones with filtering turned on (max); darker and more jagged ones without.]

Game installed fine, ran fine, music and sound effects all zero by default but I immediately had the option to change everything on the character selection screen. So far so good! Until… character creation.

From left to right: Titan, Knight, Healer, Mage, Rogue, Sorcerer

What you see in the screenshot is almost all of what you get — your class is dependent on your sex. Muscly / melee = men; magical / agile = women; oh no too many females, let’s make the Sorcerer male. *rolls eyes* But Vickie, potential castle sieges! You must play on!

Mysterious fourth customisable characteristic?

There seems to be a reserved fourth customisable characteristic, though. Different sex for different class eventually, possibly?

And so I put class aside and picked whoever looked the most appealing to me. Much like Lineage II, customisation of appearance is very limited.

I created a Mage (who reminds me of Dark Elves from Lineage II)

Heh, I’m a little predictable.

After a short personal dungeon (instanced), I made it to the main town Randol and was soon killing foxes and wolves. I think the monster animation needs a bit of rework since the distance they travel doesn’t match their strides (Is there a technical term for this?). But I keep reminding myself that this is a free game.

And there are castle sieges.

The maps (W or alt+W) are quite helpful and you can ask pretty much any NPC for direction to another NPC. NPCs with quests (Q) and quest rewards (A) are clearly marked, both on the maps and on the NPCs themselves. Teleporting to most main towns are free as well.

The game has something else I’ve really loved from Lineage II that’s also missing in Guild Wars — running all over the place and climbing hills. My character may need glasses / binoculars, though (visual distance was set to the highest).

Overlooking Randol... half of it

I met up with the online friend in the game soon. She informed me that the highest level was 145 (at the time of writing). That’s right, one hundred and frigging forty five levels. She also told me about the Guardian system (Status [T or alt+T] > Action, Social > Action > Guardian system), in which the apprentice gains a shiny weapon while the guardian gains reputation points on the condition that the former reaches level 20 in 10 days.

Revisiting the same place, now with filtering effect and new armour and weapon

We decided that it’s win for both of us if she power-levelled me, so I chose her as my guardian and soon dinged 20, got a shiny weapon, leeched enough money from the level 100+ mobs she fought to get some level-appropriate but equally revealing armour… and we’re off on our own merry ways.

Monsters (and players?) leave blood on the floor when they die in a personal dungeon, by the way. I can’t tell whether it’s awesome or unnecessary.

Blood on floor

Later, I met a princess in a personal dungeon, who, of course, needs to be saved because princesses’ sole existence is to be saved.

(My eyes might fall out if I keep rolling them like this.)

I'll save you. I'll save you NAO.

But…

Nao Princess is not looking at my face

What the quest didn’t tell you is that not only does Nao Princess not have any fighting power, she also doesn’t have any HP regeneration, ability to self-heal, dodge enemies or respond to YOU’RE STANDING IN MY FUCKING WAY either.

Without any planning and still noobish at the game thanks to being power-levelled, the rescue mission resulted in much fail.

You have failed quest [Rescue the Princess]

Anyway.

Similar to Lineage II (again), you learn skills by spending the SP you gained from killing stuff. And still similar to Lineage II, there’s never enough SP to use if you fight the natural way. In this game, though, you lose both XP and SP when you die. Therefore, in order to get enough SP, we might just have to do this:

1. Kill stuff with high SP-to-XP ratio to gain XP and SP.
2. Use SP to learn skills, preferably down to 0.
3. Suicide; lose normal amount of XP but 0 SP because you have none.
4. Repeat from step 1.

Tada! SP farming.

Coloured dragons

More things to note:

1. The screen holds for 2 seconds when you take a screenshot. Not cool.
2. There are mounts: horses (quite realistic if they’re not funky-coloured) and dragons.
3. Magic skills take a while to start casting and sometimes I can’t tell whether I hit or missed.
4. There also seems to be some sort of safe zones (near entrances of towns and outside dungeon rooms?) where your attacks fail and monsters stop chasing / won’t attack you. The zone isn’t clearly marked so it can be quite annoying for ranged players, especially spell casters.
5. Aside from the personal dungeons, everything else reminds me of Lineage II.
6. This game really reminds me of Lineage II.

And this game seriously very much reminds me of Lineage II. The UI, the music, the skills, the social actions, monster level difference equals different monster name colour (exactly the same as Lineage II’s), the grind… But I haven’t played enough of these games to tell whether this system is Lineage II-inspired or just a typical (Korean) grind game thing.

I guess I’d recommend this game to hardcore gamers who wanted to try something like Lineage II but can’t find a good private server, don’t want to pay to play, or don’t quite have the hardware for it. This game is absolutely not for casual gamers.

Me? I don’t see myself getting addicted to it, but I might play on since I have a thing for grinding.

And that, my friend, is Last Chaos and the last mid-semester break of my degree.

Anyway, on to the game! (Very image heavy, as with other gaming blog entries!)

When you first run the game, you would notice… that the music is very loud. Like, very loud. There’s no immediate way (not even shortcuts) to turn the music volume down or off other than adjusting the whole system volume. Also, the default size of the windowed mode is 1024×768, i.e. very cluttered screen. There’s no way to change it in-game but you could go into the files (\release\user.xml & \release\geConfig) to edit it if it annoyed you enough as it did me.

After I got the initial annoyances out of the way, I went ahead and created my family. Instead of giving each character a completely different name like in other games, GE goes by the family system where all the characters share the same family name… which is fine per se, but by the time I came up with a decent Baroque-y family name that wasn’t already taken, I’ve already heard the theme song enough to know how to play it on my violin. True story.

Unlike many other games, the male characters aren’t painful to look at; I even made my scout a male. Classes in the image (from left to right): Fighter, Wizard, Scout, Musketeer, Elementalist.

The wizard and scout blinked. Bleh.

Unfortunately, you only get to change the outfit of the characters later on in the game, not their appearance otherwise, i.e. all players of the same class and sex will have the same face.

Oh, but I did mention that the game is free, right? Apparently you are given some good 21 years to play it. Who knows if I would even live that long?

You always get disconnected if you stayed in the Barracks (character selection screen) for too long, though — at least that was what happened to me for a few times. Here I thought I was hacked already before I even got to play the first character that I only just created.

This game employs something called the Multi-Character Control (MCC) system, which, as the name implies, allows you to control multiple characters you created (up to 3) at the same time. Soloing (in the playing-alone sense) is actually possible!

Below is likely the most important bar (alt+I) with hotkeys a newbie would want to be familiar with, as it allows you to switch between controlling each character individually and controlling the team as a whole and more. I missed it at first and the characters I weren’t actively controlling were just standing there getting hit. I’m glad I eventually discovered it!

Poses (alt+X; some of which are included in the very beginning, some you earn through quests, and some you buy) make for some crazy idling and screenie fun, especially for people with vivid imagination, e.g. me!

But it’d be nice if the characters would breathe when they’re posing.

The trees are gorgeous too, except they turn transparent when you go near them, which I suppose is bad for screenies but good for combat.

Aside from what I already mentioned above, there are also a couple of other things I didn’t like about the game:

1. There’s no way to change where the unmoveable zone map (alt+Z) appears (in the middle of your screen by default) other than hacking into the files.

2. Other windows (inventory, quest, etc.) don’t stay where you move them. They always go back to their default positions when you zone to another map.

3. Chatting in-game is really annoying. You have to hit alt+C every time to expand the chat window. Enter key also works. Strange how it didn’t for me in the beginning.

4. We can’t move our characters with the keyboard (which is so because 24 keys are reserved for executing different skills of the 3 characters).

5. Melee characters can’t attack flying / levitating creatures.

6. Scouts can’t won’t automatically heal if they’re equipped with a weapon; and can’t do any damage whatsoever if they’re unequipped.

And what’s with female elementalists in MMORPGs not keeping their boobs in their dresses, anyway?

Not to mention giant vegetables and unmanned uninhabited stores?

MMORPG worlds are strange.

So, in conclusion, I hated the game at first because it takes a bit of getting used to the multiple character system; but ended up liking it because it’s free and… grinding is fun. Nooooooo.

Disclaimer: Some animals were harmed in the making of this introductory / review blog entry thingy. But hey, that crocodile attacked me first!