Think of the modern MMOG and you think of game clients which are gigabytes in size, vast company resources and subscription fees in the realm of £100 a year. Indeed, we write in the deep shadow of Star Trek Online's open beta activation process: a fuss of validations, sign-ups, queues and confirmations culminating in a download estimated to take another four days.
The beta for Love, meanwhile, a sort-of-massively multiplayer game born from the endeavours of a single programming savant, Eskil Steenberg, takes nine whole seconds to touchdown on to our hard-drive, at the cost of €3.
And unlike most other MMOGs, which exchange instant access for lengthy orientation, Love dazzles immediately: it looks like no other game – a wash of colours shimmering like out-of-focus reflections on a river, this hazy mutable light forming pastures, forests, ice shelves and mountains. It's a pleasure to explore, too: movement in this world is buoyant, quick and boasts the precision of Quake 3. And as you explore, its crude, fuzzy geometry yields the efforts of previous players – a stairwell winds around a massive white stone plinth, rising up from the centre of a plaza rimmed by arches. Many are broken now, and whatever item of significance the stairs rose towards has long since disappeared. Love is a game in which player creations have persistence, but only to the extent that time and decay permit.
Then, after a few minutes, you wonder what you're doing here. Beyond leaping about and occasionally plummeting to your death, it's not easy to tell what your next action should be. A tray of inscrutable hieroglyphs sits along the base of the screen, while a pair of horseshoe shapes indicate the directions of current player settlements. Obelisks and other contraptions around the environment pop-up help boxes that reference opaque mechanisms involving coordinates and power transference. Clearly you need to start at first principles. Studious examination of a wiki beckons. Perhaps Love is like other MMOGs after all.
Though it falls victim to extreme obscurantism, Love's overall intentions are straightforward: it is a firstperson RTS of sorts, in which groups of players cooperate to build settlements and defend them from AI attacks. The process requires two things: tokens and power. Tokens need to be discovered through exploration of the world, battled over with the AI, transported safely back to camp, then placed to create various dispensers – vending machines which equip your skill bar with new weapons or construction tools, allowing you to raise, lower and carve the ground, or place trees, grass or statues. So it is that you expand, beautify and defend your settlement from the aggression of the AI – your aim being merely to survive and flourish. Automatic turret defences and force fields can be erected, powered by, among other things, windmills that operate only at certain times of day (this itself dependent on latitude). It's a tactic of some convolution, requiring the player to deal with the horrors of raw numeracy, juggle coordinates and ponder abstruse factors; an excess of power is needed to charge the forcefield's battery so that it remains active while the windmills are still.
Another common defence tactic is to raise or lower the ground in such away as to make the settlement unreachable by the AI – an unfortunate corollary being that this also frustrates new players' attempts to join you. In fact, the procedurally formed geography does not always lend itself to traversal at the best of times, and it's easy to find yourself spawning at locations where the only exit is a short plunge into a pool of lethal water. This can be a perplexing introduction, needless to say, which compounds the game's disregard for explanation of its RTS component. Since players are already engaged in RTS battling and settlement building when you join, you have little chance of learning how it works.
Love will change – perhaps dramatically - consolidating the huge promise of its complex strategies and ephemeral landscape. Though this is nominally a beta test, it is also, going by Steenberg's previous comments, the state in which Love may perpetually reside: an ongoing, ever-evolving experiment that reaches no finality. Will it alter to the meet the whims of an expanded player base by more clearly delineating and rewarding progress? It all depends on Steenberg's genius, and whether it permits him to comprehend the incomprehension of others.