and sit back while we attack the utter lack of our enjoyment

Suffice it to say, I wasn't in the best mood for all of this. I was still massively depressed over the (then upcoming) closure of City of Heroes; I was (still, am, will be) dealing with the mysterious departure of an otherlove (at six months and counting at that point, longer now); and the hoped-for 'spark' of sudden liking for Champions had utterly failed to manifest.

And now I was in a game I was already regretting downloading, trying to come up with a character I could bear long enough to figure out the tutorial. Gah.

As the least objectionable of the options offered, I finally went with one of the "cute" presets (each preset had two: you've been seeing the better of the two options in each case. No, seriously), which...left me with pink hair.

(from the games album; the pouty elf from PWI)

That had to change.

I found there was a surprising amount of variability settings for the eyes. As you can see, I went for a more anime look, because she just wasn't looking any better with more realistic options.

(from the games album; now, she's a pouty goth elf)

I mucked about with the colors until I had a vaguely hazel eye and vaguely dark hair (I ended up changing to the Thai-inspired filigree head-bun cover, for the second "cute" preset; it didn't help, but it helped more than the first caged-bun option did). I found a purplish-black for lipstick, and figured that went. There are a few face sliders (not featured), but none of them work really well. How'ver, this was my first solid, not budging, complaint: the body sliders.

There are six.

None of them deal with the aberrant size of the gangplanks she walks on, nor the huge and ungainly hands. Apparently, those are stuck for all time being larger than some of the monsters I was about to fight.

Great.

And then, I entered the game. I picked a generic fantasy name after a surprisingly brief amount of thought; I think I'd already decided she was just a run-through character, and I'd make a new one later. I was ready (or so I thought) for the tutorial.

(from the games album; Director Tsan, teach me!)

That tutorial? You're looking at it. I'm not kidding. I walked into the world, immediately saw a hovering icon over Director Tsan's head, and trooped over to talk with her. The first things she tells me make no mention of how I access world features, game features, or explain the HUD settings in any meaningful way. Oh, who am I kidding? There's no reference to these things at all.

The only thing I can think of, is that PWI is such a bland, flavorless clone of other Asian grinder MMOs, that everyone used to the style automatically adapts to the HUD controls and off they go. To grind for hours for...how is this fun for anyone, again?

Also, this is the first mission given. And that mission is to kill ten of a type of monster and report back. There's a time limit. Thankfully, they're a) everywhere and b) easy to kill, but seriously, people--I didn't know how to use spells, how to cast them, how to attack in the first place; I barely knew how to move, and now they expected me to squeal in delight and go pound beetles into dust?

Cue dispirited 'yay', but off I went.

[Insert from the Editrix, later: a friend of mine also dipped into the collective pond of PWI. She says, after one performs the initial two quests, Director Tsan then explains how one uses their particular set of powers and abilities, and also how to move and pick things up. You know, the basics that should have been outlined before combat in the actual game. I wouldn't know, because after I returned to Tsan, double-batch of stupidly easy local wildlife vanquished, she told me she had more instructions for me, which I assumed meant "I'm going to give you yet another meaningless time-waster. Off you go!"

[So I quit the game. But that's still to come in future entries at this point.]