This game can be fun if you want absolute freedom, provided you can muster up the required patience it demands at times.
Fans of the Sims Online might initialy think that this is a cheap imitation of their beloved game when they first start exploring the building options in Second Life. But those who stick with it will soon come to the conclusion that the scope of this game is far larger than that of the Sims Online. Building in this game can best be compared to building sand castles with an enormous variety of tools at your disposal. Some people might choose to just fill a bucket with sand, tip it over and be done with it. While such an overly simplistic structure might not serve any purpose the option to build it is still there. On the other side, however, you can use all the tools available to you and build yourself almost anything your imagination can conjure up. What’s more, you can further enhance your constructions with scripts. There’s a huge scripting library available to you, and you can combine all the scripting elements in just about every way you can imagine.
All sounds a bit overwhelming? Well it can be, depending on how complex you’re trying to make things. It’s like all things in life, the more complex you try to go, the more time you’ll have to spend learning the nescesary skills. The thing with Second Life, though, is that the focus really is on learning as you go. There is no real manual to guide you through the entire process of learning how to construct. And quite frankly, considering the scope of the game it’d be a near-impossible task to write such a manual. This doesn’t mean you’re completely on your own, as there are plenty of people available in and out of the game willing to help you out. Some people have even built entire places dedicated to teaching you whatever they know. But regardless of all the helpful people in the end it is still all down to your own willingless to teaching yourself.
Now suppose you are willing to teach yourself the ropes, there’s still several annoyances you will have to put up with along the way. In most occastions this all comes down to being patient as you try to lign up different objects with each other in an attempt to, say, build yourself a house. However, this slight annoyence can turn into utter frustration when you see one or several of your carefully constructed objetcs vanish into thin air due to a small mistake or one of the ever-existing bugs in the game. Imagine having spent days on constructing a gigantic castle, only to have it go up in smoke because of a bug or a small mistake. The game certainly isn’t forgiving when it comes to making mistakes, and this can make many a person feel like banging their head against a very solid wall. Yes, there is an undo function, but don’t expect this function to bail you out whenever you goof up. When building something you had better keep your wits about or risk losing or ruining your construction and having to start all over again.
By now you’re probably thinking of this game as nothing but a big old construction sim, which isn’t entirely wrong, but it is also only part of the game’s many sides. For instance, you actually have an avatar in the game--a visual representation of yourself which you can modify in just about every way conceivable. You can do such things to your avatar as changing his or her shape, size and skin or dressing him or her up with whatever kind of clothing you want. Do you want your avatar to look like the next Bill Gates or have a buff body to make Arnold jealous? Go ahead, no one’s stopping you from doing so. Heck, with all the options available to you it’s even entirely possible to make your avatar look like a cat or a dragon, with corresponding animations and gestures.
Gestures, by the way, are simple animations or sounds that help you express yourself through your avatar. Think of making your character burp, or giving someone the middle finger. Unfortunately, all this modifying of your avatar can come with the same kind of frustrations as building. Here, too, the game is never all that forgiving when it comes to making mistakes. And to be honest, completely modifying your avatar into a visual representation that appeals to you can sometimes be an even more daunting task that constructing buildings, unless you go about it the easy way by simply buying most of the stuff you want to adorn your character with. But we’ll get to that in a moment.
One of the most popular elements in the game are pose –and animation balls. They’re called balls because that’s the typically used shape for these kind of objects. When you first encounter them they seem like nothing but simple balls that probably seem completely out of place in just about any enviroment you find yourself in. However, the magic happens when you sit on on of those balls. You see, they’re called animation or pose balls for a reason. As you use these objects you’ll suddenly see your character take on a pose or follow a carefully constructed animation. This can range from anything like sitting down, dancing or even more... adult-orientated animations. And yes, it is entirely possible to make these balls yourself.
Don’t expect all these animations to be jaw dropping cool though as not everyone who makes them is as dedicated to making them look good. In fact, when using these balls they almost always need adjusting in one way or another. This is especially obvious with balls meant for two or more characters, such as hugging poses. Sometimes this means just lowering the corresponding pose balls so that the characters are actually touching the ground (or whatever other object they’re supposed to be sitting), but there are also plentiful of occasions where you’ll notice such odd things as an arm sticking through someone’s chest. These clipping errors are simply caused by the fact that animation or pose balls don’t have any built-in clipping calculation or collision detection. Take in the fact that no avatar is the same in this game, and you end up with the result that the pose might be perfect for you and a particular other person, but ends up looking like utter crap when used by other people.
Since we were talking clipping already, let’s talk a bit about the graphics. Against today’s standards the game looks quite lousy. But let’s not forget that this game was released over two years ago, and when compared against other online games in its genre the graphics really aren’t all that bad. Problem is, however, that even on reasonable hardware, capable of running today’s graphic intensive games, Second Life has some serious framerate issues. Most of these framerate issues spring from the fact that the world of Second Life is ever evolving in real time, meaning that it’s very had to optimize cache use for it. Simply put, everything you see is loaded on-the-fly. There is some caching going on, but only to a limited degree. Factor in that this is a full-fledged online game and you can imagine how the lack of caching and network activity can be a serious strain on your hardware.
Still, one can’t help but wonder if the developers couldn’t have done something to improve this issue at least somewhat, especially when taking into consideration how crowded certain places can get. In such cases, using the hardware at my disposal, I oftentimes saw the framerate drop into the single-digit region. And considering that the hardware used for this game can run graphic intensive games as Doom 3 without too many problems one can’t help but wonder just how much optimizing the developers of Second Life did, if any.
And yes, clipping errors still exist outside the use of the afformentioned pose balls. Most of the collision faults come in the form of you bumping into something and not being able to see it until several seconds later because the object still needs to be loaded. Quite annoying, yes, but not nearly as weird as seeing half of your character dissapear into the floor for no obvious reason. You might think that this is probably limited to certain areas of the game, but don’t be surprised if it happens at places you’ve visited before without any problems. Again, this serves to wonder if the game couldn’t have been better of with some more tweaking, as it’s obvious that at times the collision detection and clipping detection is simply several steps behind on where your avatar is in the world at that moment.
So what about the whole visiting places thing then? Well it would be a rather pointless game if people built all kinds of stuff, created fun things to do and no one can visit those places or make use of the entertainment someone so carefully constructed. So unless someone made their ‘place’ private, you’ve been banned, or the region is full you can just about go anywhere you please. These places can be just about anything, ranging from a virtual club to a store for you to buy whatever’s on sale there.
And now, finally, we come to that aspect I promised to talk about earlier: buying. In Second Life, anything that’s been built, scripted or otherwise created can be put up for sale. Whoever puts something up for sale is in complete control as to what the person who buys it can do with it. Can they modify the object? Will they be able to transfer or copy, or maybe even resell it? All such permissions and a few more can be set by the person initialy offering the item up for sale. Fun thing is, you can simply put up copies of the original up for sale so more than one person can buy it without you having to recreate it everytime. A very, very good thing because it’s highly unlikely anyone would want to spend their time constantly recreating objects they just spent days making.
Ok, so now we know a bit about selling, but what about buying? Well, by opening up the find menu you can search for all kinds of things such as people (if you know their name obviously), events and even places with stores. Looking for something you want to buy is as simple as hitting the find button, making sure you’ve got the ‘places’ tab selected, typing in the kind of item you want and hitting search. Voila, a nice list of places that sell the type of item you’re looking for. How convenient is that? Just hit teleport and fly the rest of the way (and no I’m not gonna talk about that in detail unless you want this review to be even longer than it already is).
Well... no it’s that quite that convenient. Or at least not always. For instance, typing the words ‘clothes’ and then hitting search will yield you a list long enough to make your head spin. Luckily, you can easily see which places get the most traffic and as such are likely to be the most popular ones. Unfortunately, however, just because the place showed in your list of searches and is at the top of the list doesn’t always mean it’ll actually have what you just searched for. Heck, sometimes the places listed don’t have anything that even closely resembles what you’re looking for. And the more stuff a place you visit has, the more time it will take to load all the items on display (or pictures displaying the items). These loading times can get so bad that even the most patient person will start to consider just building the item themselves because that might yield quicker result.
If you’ve actually been reading the review up until this point instead of just skimming through it, you will probably have noticed that you can search for more than just stores. Obviously, this means you can visit more than just stores as well. Most of these places you’ll visit are likely to be there to offer people in Second Life some form of entertainment built by other people. Once again, you should keep in mind that just about everything you see is created by players for players unless said otherwise. This means that as long as someone created the kind of entertainment you’re looking for you will find it. However, like looking for a store, just because a place will show up in your search results doesn’t always mean it’ll have what you searched for.
Simply put, alot of finding involves trial and error. This doesn’t mean you will make a mistake and see a game over screen. Rather it means that you might find yourself having to hit the find option quite a few times before you finally find what you’re looking for. So, just like constructing, getting to desired places can be just as demanding on your patience.
It’s about time we wrapped this little review up before it gets as mind boggling as some of the lists in the search results of Second Life. However, I will quickly say something about the sound in the game before my closing comments.
The general sound in the game is pretty bad, if there is any at all that is. There are few standard sounds in the game, and the ones that are there, like a blowing wind as you fly, sound about as bad dying cat in heat. Music in itself is non-existent in the game unless someone set up a stream in the area you happen to be passing through. Most of the times this is the case, but with there being so many different places to pass through the music is almost constantly changing unless you stick to one spot. The nice thing about being able to stream music into the game, though, is that you can actually make yourself a full-fledged virtual club, right down to a virtual DJ to play your favorite tunes. Or, if you have your own little house, you can stream whatever music you want to listen to.
Other than that, you’re also able to upload sound clips, which you can spread around for people to use, or for your own personal use. Just don’t expect all the music and suond clips you hear along the way to be of a consistent quality as it all depends on the person who made those sounds or is streaming the music. Most of the times the quality of the music and uploaded sound clips are reasonable, but there are also occasions where you’ll hear something and wonder if it’d be at all possible to permanently pull the plug on whoever’s computer that music or sound originated from.
Second Life is probably one of the most difficult games to review. There is simply so much ever-evolving content in the game, and so much to do that it’s nearly impossible to take it all into consideration. Your level of enjoyment with this game, quite frankly, depends on how willing you are to put up with the annoyances and faults it has (some of which weren’t even mentioned in this review) and exactly what you plan on doing. One thing that can be said for certain is that if you’re looking for an actual game with a goal like most games and you’re not into the open-ended type of games, then this game isn’t for you. However, if it’s absolute freedom what you’re looking for and you can put up with the excercise in patience the game demands at times, then you might just find yourself getting addicted to this game.