″OASIS was much more than a game or an entertainment platform.”
Ernest Cline. "Ready Player One"
OASIS was many things. So many things in fact, the film and the book couldn't show them all. Some of the things should be probably left untouched, but some, well, one in particular, is rather interesting.
ETERNUM *IS* OASIS.
Except it isn't.
If one is given two smartphone models, of different brands, for example, can it be said that those phones are the same thing? Surely they are used the same, they have the same functions, but they were made differently, on different assembly lines, by different people. One can be different from another in many subtle things, yet these subtle differences are what makes us prefer one model over the other.
ETERNUM is different. Yes, it is clearly inspired by OASIS, no doubt here, adressing the elephant in the room. But it is different. Caribdis could definitely make minimal core design changes and achieve the same result. But the changes were made. Are they for the better? For the worse? No matter, their intention was to create some distance between the game and it's inspiration.
The setting
Minor spoilers ahead.
It is actually closer to our daily world as it could be. People still use cars, go to universities, meet with their friends, engage in outdoor activities. Nothing of the extreme exists in this world. Nothing but ETERNUM. The precise elaboration is not present, but to shorten things up, there are neural implant chips which allow the user to connect to a different world while physically remaining in a sleeping state in real world.
"With a neural implant that recreates the five senses, it becomes impossible to distinguish between the game and the real world." - so the main question is solved here. ETERNUM is seamless. OASIS wasn't.
This seamlessness allows the users to abuse the virtual world, as no law and order from the real world applies here. So, while original OASIS was a teaching program and later developed in all kinds of things, ETERNUM instead focused on providing a refuge for people with specific interests to gather up and communicate with each other as if it was real world.
"With power comes responsibility" - where has this quote ever worked? Not here, at least. For that much attention ETERNUM is getting, it is surprisingly underdeveloped on the infrastructural level. This may have been a negligible letdown, if the same problems weren't already solved by Cline in his novel. I could never understand why would the developer of ETERNUM game take on such a massive setting, if he either couldn't or didn't bother shaping the worldbuilding properly before digging into the plot. Here are some of few things which stand out and completely ruin the story:
* Levels, which are obtained by earning experience, and as quted by one of the main characters, are only for show-off. 5 seconds later, and the protagonist is told that the best stuff is literally gated behind a level requirement. Why? What is the concept of levels in real world? There is literally none. One does not have to get some abstract experience to suddenly get substantial benefits from just that. It wasn't in OASIS, why is it here? The problem I have is that it is never used for anything, like come on, why go all this way to never adress the protagonist's level and why EXACTLY should he want to increase it?
* Questionable authority. In the 0.1 chunk the protagonist meets the representative of local authority acting as if she was a god, or, more precisely - Judge Dredd. Unstopabble and undeniable justice. Later, in 0.2 chunk, THE SAME representatives are killed by the protagonist left right and center, without any consequences whatsoever. This was the plot point which ruined the setting for me.
* One last thing before we move on. The servers, and how they are accessed. Yes, for the sake of plot the protagonist had to meet "The Hackerman" incarnate and use her abilities to personal benefit. For some reason, this involves hacking the game so badly that the hacker takes over several characters and dumps them into otherwise inaccessible server. Now remember what chaos are hackers in GTA Online able to perform with but a fraction of such powers? I doubt the game would even remotely be playable or interesting, if you could login one day and become teleported to some killbox where you would be killed and looted, and then maybe even stuck in deathloop or even lose control of own avatar? Terrible! Ok, this is just one person, this is an exception, noone else can do this. Aaaand, here comes the skeleton man, woop woop, your stuff is gone. And law enforcers literally do nothing about it.
* Ok, I lied, this would be the last thing. Remember how in OASIS every perk, every power was from an actual artefact which gives some advantages, can be farmed somewhere and more precisely, can be countered with something else. (MAJOR SPOILER FOR "READY PLAYER ONE AHEAD") When the nuke-bomb went off in OASIS, everyone but the protagonist died, because the protagonist had an artefact granting him an extra life. Everything there was self-explanatory. But not in ETERNUM.
How the hell does protagonist posess some sort of magic? Why is one of the artefacts having a key role to the plot in an unfinished server and what exactly is it's purpose? Why is the antagonist unkillable for some reason? Why is the protagonist literally invincible?
The setting is like a house of cards. Make it simple, it will be more resilient, but nothing special. Make it complex, people will admire it, but one mistake and it all falls down. It did it. It fell, for me at least.
The plot
It differs from the setting in such way: setting is where stuff happens, while plot is what actually happens. And what actually happens is one big mistery. I don't want to talk much about the plot, as in current state it consists of so many inconsistent events that it is very hard for me to weave them together into one picture. A lot of characters are introduced, the player is dumped on a lot of events with those characters, however the timeline is not complete, the story jumps a day or two all of a sudden, and the events are so unevenly distributed, that it somehow managed to look unnatural. It really does feel like several separate lines of events at once, with poor attempts to connect them together. This impacts the character development, but more severely it impacts the meaning of a lot of text lines. Why talk about something which then gets skipped entirely? Why state it as meaningful information if it does nothing but further confusing the player?
In short, the plot is as follows: the student goes to different city, gets in a new university, gets a neural implant and goes on enjoying the game which the implant gives access to. But then everything goes downhill - solving problems, mysteries left and right, dealing with some complete bullshit in both worlds and so on. For me it is rather hard to understand what is going on currently at any given point in time, what was before and what was after. If it wasn't so for the developer, he then failed to include the crucial information into the release version. Some calendar maybe? A timeline? A phone notification menu? Where are we even?
The art
It pains me to say so, but the art is outright bad. The render quality is lacking, the lighting is botched, many clipping mistakes and seams on textures are visible. The worst thing is that to notice this and make a point out of it, all I had to do was to launch up another game from the top of this cite rating (which I unfortunately am not allowed to name in this review according to guidelines) and it feeled like I advanced 10 years in render quality. There are many great games with low quality 3D renders, of course. But the same time there are many great games with significantly better renders, significantly more detailed backgrounds, smoother lighting, cleaner animations and more polygons in clothing and hair. The bar for 3DCG games was raised so high in the past years that currently someone unwilling to sacrifice a half of own life to compete with those at the top, will inveitably be compared to those at the top and lose in that comparisson.
For such an amazingly complex game surely it wouldn't be a problem to do more thorough renders, hire someone with better experiences with setting up light in scenes, doing animations? I hope the renders will be remade, as we all learn by making imperfect art and then perfecting it with practice. There are games in which either some of the worst events were re-rendered and animations done from scratch, and there are even games which after 6 long chapters stopped and remade the first one entirely, marginally increasing the quality.
Here also the art is sometimes really good, but, when it comes to the art of ETERNUM itself, what it feels like is in attempt to make the scenes more vibrant the artist may have pushed too far. The scenes in 0.3 batch were especially painful to watch with all the magic effects beaming from them. God damn.
The adult content
7.
7 scenes.
In 3 giant batches. Underwhelming? Absolutely! Is is "quality over quantity"? Well, how about no? The quantity of everything else is theough the roof, while the reason for this game being "adult" - not so much. The quality is also lacking in those scenes, half of those are shallow and don't have much beyond talks and some naked body renders. Those with miscellanious characters are not interesting. Those with main heroines are sometimes lacking the obvious PoV.
There are games with few sex scenes. And they are great games. But they make up for it in the length and quality of every scene. Dozens of renders. Several animations of different actions. Several PoVs for every action. Adjustable speed of animation. Name it, it has be done... elsewhere. Major letdown, I have expected way more either quality or quantity judging on other games of similar engine and genre.
The summary
Are we there yet? No, not yet. A great game with a great potential, but a lot of problems.
The setting and plot both have more holes than a strainer, several things don't make sense even as for now, I fear it may be getting worse as the plot grows in later chapters.
The text is massive, but it's meaning is not quite there. Not everyone is Lev Tolstoj or Alexandre Dumas to write giant tomes on any possible theme, and an attempt to extend the text doesn't quite give the expected results when viewed from the lense of importance to the plot.
The art is decent, but not perfect, the lighting is unbalanced - scenes may be either very bright or very dim, the saturation aswell. The animations are good but not polished enough, some crucial PoVs are not there when they should be.
Finally the amount of sex scenes is not enough, their quality doesn't make up for an abcense of quantity.
I have rated the game as 3/5 (Average). I could rate it as 4/5 as for now if the setting had a little less holes in it, now it is like 3.5/5 for me, but I cannot quite justify giving it a solid 4 yet.
I really hope to come back to this review and change it in the following updates, improving the given score. This game is already at the very top of weighted rating on this site, and, well, it is a great game. But being great means being great at everything, which I do believe this game will eventually become. But not right now, let's wait and see.
I do recommend playing this game, but perhaps not in current state, rather when it has more content.
Thank you all for reading!