Wobblegong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wobblegong) wrote2025-04-09 03:05 am
wobblegong) wrote2025-04-09 03:05 am
Entry tags:
Wobbles Plays DINOSAURS!!
Due to THE EVERYTHING I have been deep in the manic hyperfixation mines for the last while– gotta have something to happily obsess over in my free time. For some reason this time around my lightning tapioca has fixated on Path of Titans. This is bizarre for many reasons.
I picked up Path Of Titans the better part of three years ago after one of my close friends showed it to me. We immediately set out to play it together, of course, because OH MY GOSH DINOS! Not as zoo animals or pets but US! OURSELVES! Running around in a world of NOTHING ELSE BUT MORE DINOS!! For a certain type of person there is nothing cooler and more fun than to be the hungry stegosaurus munching on a bush, or the hungry t-rex sneaking up on the stegosaurus. But we only spent a night or two on it before losing steam. It turns out Path of Titans is, like its microgenre brethren, a game about being a dinosaur. But it also turns out Path of Titans offers you relentless friction against getting to actually do that.
Step 0, or perhaps even -1, is getting the damn game. These days there's the option to play for free on the mobile version (why is there a mobile version??) but if you don't want to deal with account restrictions and buying the dino roster four at a time, you will simply buy a full copy. A full copy is $30 and so we arrive at the first skinned knee: you (or your wealthy patron) need to want to play so much that you'll cough up $30 for a game whose selling points are: you can play as a dino! End list. The game is very well made, considering, and everything that's been put in the game is finely crafted, beautiful, largely not buggy. But PoT reminds me of the nascent 3D worlds of 1998: I was so captivated by the prospect of being able to navigate around and between 3D shapes representing a virtual world that I didn't mind that that's all there was to them.
Path of Titans is a game about being a dinosaur. What does being a dinosaur entail? Well... you eat when you're hungry, and drink when you're thirsty, and if there's other dinos around you're likely to get into a fight! But for the long, looooong stretches of time between those activities... there's... uhh... really simple quests that make MMORPG design circa 2002 look ground-breaking? And admiring the scenery.
You have to be so excited by the prospect of being a dinosaur that you don't mind how, let's say, creative you'll need to be about keeping yourself amused. For $30.
Also unlike everything else under the sun, this PC game (with many console ports!) is NOT on Steam. You will be installing their own launcher just for this one game, plus their own DRM for just this one game. Cripes.
Okay, say you go for it and buy the game and install it all. Now you can play it!
OR CAN YOU?
Path of Titans offers singleplayer, regular multiplayer and community multiplayer. I am absolutely certain there's people out there who think this would be great as a single-player game, but personally I cannot imagine it. Even as a shy introvert I need more social stimulation than sitting in a digital forest for two hours during which nothing happens. At least in multiplayer you'll be able to chat with strangers, or fight them (you may decide which you'd prefer).
Now, I mentioned PoT is pretty well crafted, but here's the thing about what they're doing: this is an asymmetrical Player-versus-Player (PvP) game at heart. The whole point is different dinos are different, right? A triceratops and a velociraptor should not play the same! And so they don't. A big bulky dino can bring the pain but is far slower than a nimble little sprinty guy. A brachiosaurus can whip you with its neck and tail while a gator is low to the ground with a thickly-armored back. Etc. When two players go toe to two in combat, they have different to WILDLY different abilities, which makes some foes easier or tougher to deal with. And so the game, by default, has very few overarching rules or limits on PvP combat!
So regular multiplayer is a 24/7 thunderdome of tyrannosaurus rex murdering each other, constantly, forever.
Do you want to do anything besides play a t-rex murdering & being murdered by other t-rex? Too bad! 95% of PvP enthusiasts who bought this game did it so they could be a t-rex who murders everyone else! The remaining 5% are excited to murder everyone constantly forever as something more esoteric than a t-rex, like an (eo)triceratops. Or maybe a "duck" (deinocheirus). (These players usually have the much higher body counts and I recommend being even more afraid of them than the t-rex people.) But either way, you will not escape the endless carnage.
It is around this point that I cut in to explain: I, Wobblegong, do not like PvP. I never have in all my life! I hate conflict even on a good day and I'm a giant tantrum baby who is the worst sport ever when someone beats me in a video game. I simply do not buy or play games where PvP is mandatory.
But I want to play dinos SO VERY MUCH.
So initially when I picked it up to play with my friend, we would go to the community multiplayer server list, that is, multiplayer servers set up & run by players instead of the game's developers. And then we'd pick out any random server which had <5 people playing. Nobody can murder you if there's nobody around!
However when you join a Community Multiplayer server it pops up a window listing that server's rules. By rules I mean the rules you have to agree to and if you break them the people running the server will be very mad and kick/ban you. For many of these servers it didn't just list a few rules. Many of these servers listed so many rules there was a scroll bar to read them all, and then they'd explain the FULL ruleset could be found on their Discord server which you were required to join and if you played on the server at all you were implicitly agreeing to all of this.
I fucking hate joining a Discord server for everything under the sun, but after a night or two of this I got morbidly curious what the full rules could possibly be– everything I was seeing at that server welcome screen was already so long and involved– and poked my nose in.
Two of the most terrifying "let's make up more rules about it" forces in video game player bases are 1) folks trying to fix an asymmetrical PvP game to be a little less "perpetual thunderdome" and a little more "interesting PvP that doesn't feel unfair or annoy you 80% of the time" and 2) roleplayers.
It turns out Path of Titans combines these two kinds of people and then lets them set up community multiplayer servers with whatever custom rulesets they desire. Any at all.
My good gamers, the first simplified rule list I found on that Discord server was more than twenty-five list items long. With sub-lists. A LOT of sub-lists. If you don't have a friend to simply tell you "we're playing on this server" you must become conversant in subcultures within an already niche subgenre of video games just to figure out which servers you're allowed to breathe the air of. If I had to invent a continuum it runs from "no-holds-barred t-rex thunderdome (with more dino species added by enterprising players!)" to "roleplayers so obsessed with the idea of AUTHENTICALLY rping a dinosaur that they have multi-page pamphlets for every single species listing out everything they are and are not allowed to do all the way down to what bodies of water it is permissible to drink out of". The joking-but-not-a-joke I shared with my friends upon first meeting the deeper end of the RPer scale was that these dinosaur roleplayers make MMORPG cop RPers look like casuals. (To the uninitiated this is devastating. My friends were terrified.) This also doesn't entirely surprise me because, look, there's a kind of person out there who will UM AKSHUALLY you about the most minor dinosaur trivia possible. Teach them what text roleplaying is and voila, here are your detailed rules including a PvP priority order five bullet points long about how Giganotosaurus hates Carcharodontosaurus the most but when there's none of those around it can hunt apex carnivores UNLESS there's any sauropods or hadrosaurs around in which case it has to try to eat the saurpods or hadrosaurs first, but only if the sauropods or hadrosaurs are not full-grown adults.
PSYCH! I got that Giganoto hunt priority list from a SEMI-realism server! Semi-realism servers are for casuals who are not committed to the true experience of roleplaying a dinosaur and thus have far fewer rules. Their main rules documents only totalled about 20 pages in google sheets, excepting the individual dino rules which are stored in their discord server. Each dino has 1-3 pages of individual rules. Casuals.
Now that I have distracted and horrified(/tempted) you with a glimpse into the void, you have forgotten to ask an important question: if there's such wild variety in the community servers, how do you look around for one your actually want to play on?
That's the fun part!
You get NO help with that!
Every community multiplayer is listed in an enormous jumble in the Server List pane. It shows the host region (for internet lag/language purposes) and if any of your game-friends are logged into it, then server name, number of players online, and then which map it is. The players online number is useful for assessing out how popular it is right then (and whether it's too full to join)... and the map kinda sorta matters depending on whether you care about some stuff. But in terms of "does this server have the player-enforced rules I am interested in" your only hint is, at most, the server name. All servers want to name themself something flavorful or cool but if they're careful with their character count they can wedge some jargon in there to give you SOME idea what they're about. "Veloccis Realm 10xG 20xM" is advertising ten-times faster Growth and twenty-times Marks rewards (ie coins. I Can't Believe They're Not Gold Coins). "Blazing Plains Realism" iswarning informing you it's a Realism server, ie, deep into the AUTHENTIC DINO ROLEPLAYING end of the spectrum. And so on.
Because the server name field has nowhere near enough space for the semaphore to cover all bases, your best-case scenario is to find some promising leads and then one by one connect to them and read their rules splash page. If, upon reading, you do not feel moved to click the "I Agree" and play there, you get to back out to the Server List again and try the next one.
Or more likely, go "hey wait what was the next one I wanted to look at called, heck, why is the list in a totally different order now so it's not listed anymore?" and spend thirty seconds scrolling up and down the list, trying to remember the term de arte that led you you looking at it, putting that into the Search field to bring it up by name, then waiting for the Server List to actually let you refresh it because to save bandwidth you are only allowed to refresh the server list every 6 seconds at most (2006-ass design). Trying to scroll to another page of the list requires this rate-limited refresh btw (2006-ass design).
If you think this promotes joining servers haphazardly just because fighting the UI is too irritating to put up with for long, that was certainly my experience!
And again, just because you find a community multiplayer server you maybe-hopefully want to play on doesn't mean you're done. Anything which isn't a lawless wasteland definitionally has rules, which means you need to go read those rules. (No, really– even if you hate authority you probably don't want to be chain-banned because you have no idea why people are yelling "bd" in global chat.) If you're lucky the mandatory Discord will at least put all the rules in one spot. But don't worry, even if your taste is lawless wastelands, they still want you to join their Discord server. And probably still have at least a few rules you'll be chain-kicked for unknowingly violating if you don't read carefully.
So your reward for wanting to play dinos so badly you'll shell out $7-30 for it is hunting through the Classifieds with a magnifying glass until, at last, you get to... do a bunch of homework. And almost certainly join a Discord server.
...
Now that I have roasted Path of Titans for 2,100 words, you may think, surely this means Wobbles hates it? Unfortunately dear reader (and you are quite dear if you made it this far) I really... really... REALLY want to play dinos. I want to play a funny ostrich or a chicken nugget with legs or a Nessie. I want to crest the hill as a 20-foot-tall Edward Scissorhands bird to watch the sun rise. I want to dip my tiny sauropod head in a pond to drink water among reeds that barely come up to my elbows. I want to weave between boulders at a sprint, sunlight hitting my dimetrodon sail, as I look for chipmunks to snack on. I want to snooze on a hillside picking out a pretty new scale pattern. I want to roam a map I've never seen slowly learning where the best food and questing is.
And for all the other hassles PoT besets me with, it does offer me these things.
So when I watched a couple videos on youtube of some stranger having fun in PoT I reinstalled it. This time around I had a much better idea of what the semaphore in the community server names meant; I also had the time to analyze the servers at my leisure and be more persistent about finding one that fit me. I alternated reading reams of damn rules with messing around a little bit in the actual world. I googled basic gameplay questions, checked controls/options, found the non-fandom wiki and left guides open to consult as I played. This time, unlike my first brief foray, I invested the effort to get truly comfortable instead of hoping I'd frictionlessly land somewhere good.
And now? I've led my friend, both of us shrieking, between a gap in the boulders too tiny for the chasing t-rex to follow us through. I've hatched from another player's nest and followed them halfway across the map to a verdant haven where I grew up strong enough to make the journey back home. I've laid in the bushes perfectly unmoving as a pair of dilophosaurs hunted past me, intent on the enormous triceratops I could hear but not see. I've beachcombed in the gloom of pouring rain, counting on the dim and fog to hide me while I rushed quests to grow up that much faster. I've crept after a hunting rex, wondering if it knew I was there, only to watch it break into a sprint to close on a sleeping spinosaurus, and now I had a front-row seat to the ensuing fight.
The effort to find a server or three I care to play on is so easily forgotten once I'm actually playing. Once there's friendly strangers offering groups for fun and protection. Once I can send a silly screenshot of other people horsing around to the Discord's photo gallery and get half a dozen strangers laughing in emoji along with it.
At which point I have not been lying about what gameplay is comprised of (walking simulator-ass game) but as long as I'm a parasaurolophus or whatever it's fun to simply exist in a virtual world. And by gum, Path of Titans will give you that.
I picked up Path Of Titans the better part of three years ago after one of my close friends showed it to me. We immediately set out to play it together, of course, because OH MY GOSH DINOS! Not as zoo animals or pets but US! OURSELVES! Running around in a world of NOTHING ELSE BUT MORE DINOS!! For a certain type of person there is nothing cooler and more fun than to be the hungry stegosaurus munching on a bush, or the hungry t-rex sneaking up on the stegosaurus. But we only spent a night or two on it before losing steam. It turns out Path of Titans is, like its microgenre brethren, a game about being a dinosaur. But it also turns out Path of Titans offers you relentless friction against getting to actually do that.
Step 0, or perhaps even -1, is getting the damn game. These days there's the option to play for free on the mobile version (why is there a mobile version??) but if you don't want to deal with account restrictions and buying the dino roster four at a time, you will simply buy a full copy. A full copy is $30 and so we arrive at the first skinned knee: you (or your wealthy patron) need to want to play so much that you'll cough up $30 for a game whose selling points are: you can play as a dino! End list. The game is very well made, considering, and everything that's been put in the game is finely crafted, beautiful, largely not buggy. But PoT reminds me of the nascent 3D worlds of 1998: I was so captivated by the prospect of being able to navigate around and between 3D shapes representing a virtual world that I didn't mind that that's all there was to them.
Path of Titans is a game about being a dinosaur. What does being a dinosaur entail? Well... you eat when you're hungry, and drink when you're thirsty, and if there's other dinos around you're likely to get into a fight! But for the long, looooong stretches of time between those activities... there's... uhh... really simple quests that make MMORPG design circa 2002 look ground-breaking? And admiring the scenery.
You have to be so excited by the prospect of being a dinosaur that you don't mind how, let's say, creative you'll need to be about keeping yourself amused. For $30.
Also unlike everything else under the sun, this PC game (with many console ports!) is NOT on Steam. You will be installing their own launcher just for this one game, plus their own DRM for just this one game. Cripes.
Okay, say you go for it and buy the game and install it all. Now you can play it!
OR CAN YOU?
Path of Titans offers singleplayer, regular multiplayer and community multiplayer. I am absolutely certain there's people out there who think this would be great as a single-player game, but personally I cannot imagine it. Even as a shy introvert I need more social stimulation than sitting in a digital forest for two hours during which nothing happens. At least in multiplayer you'll be able to chat with strangers, or fight them (you may decide which you'd prefer).
Now, I mentioned PoT is pretty well crafted, but here's the thing about what they're doing: this is an asymmetrical Player-versus-Player (PvP) game at heart. The whole point is different dinos are different, right? A triceratops and a velociraptor should not play the same! And so they don't. A big bulky dino can bring the pain but is far slower than a nimble little sprinty guy. A brachiosaurus can whip you with its neck and tail while a gator is low to the ground with a thickly-armored back. Etc. When two players go toe to two in combat, they have different to WILDLY different abilities, which makes some foes easier or tougher to deal with. And so the game, by default, has very few overarching rules or limits on PvP combat!
So regular multiplayer is a 24/7 thunderdome of tyrannosaurus rex murdering each other, constantly, forever.
Do you want to do anything besides play a t-rex murdering & being murdered by other t-rex? Too bad! 95% of PvP enthusiasts who bought this game did it so they could be a t-rex who murders everyone else! The remaining 5% are excited to murder everyone constantly forever as something more esoteric than a t-rex, like an (eo)triceratops. Or maybe a "duck" (deinocheirus). (These players usually have the much higher body counts and I recommend being even more afraid of them than the t-rex people.) But either way, you will not escape the endless carnage.
It is around this point that I cut in to explain: I, Wobblegong, do not like PvP. I never have in all my life! I hate conflict even on a good day and I'm a giant tantrum baby who is the worst sport ever when someone beats me in a video game. I simply do not buy or play games where PvP is mandatory.
But I want to play dinos SO VERY MUCH.
So initially when I picked it up to play with my friend, we would go to the community multiplayer server list, that is, multiplayer servers set up & run by players instead of the game's developers. And then we'd pick out any random server which had <5 people playing. Nobody can murder you if there's nobody around!
However when you join a Community Multiplayer server it pops up a window listing that server's rules. By rules I mean the rules you have to agree to and if you break them the people running the server will be very mad and kick/ban you. For many of these servers it didn't just list a few rules. Many of these servers listed so many rules there was a scroll bar to read them all, and then they'd explain the FULL ruleset could be found on their Discord server which you were required to join and if you played on the server at all you were implicitly agreeing to all of this.
I fucking hate joining a Discord server for everything under the sun, but after a night or two of this I got morbidly curious what the full rules could possibly be– everything I was seeing at that server welcome screen was already so long and involved– and poked my nose in.
Two of the most terrifying "let's make up more rules about it" forces in video game player bases are 1) folks trying to fix an asymmetrical PvP game to be a little less "perpetual thunderdome" and a little more "interesting PvP that doesn't feel unfair or annoy you 80% of the time" and 2) roleplayers.
It turns out Path of Titans combines these two kinds of people and then lets them set up community multiplayer servers with whatever custom rulesets they desire. Any at all.
My good gamers, the first simplified rule list I found on that Discord server was more than twenty-five list items long. With sub-lists. A LOT of sub-lists. If you don't have a friend to simply tell you "we're playing on this server" you must become conversant in subcultures within an already niche subgenre of video games just to figure out which servers you're allowed to breathe the air of. If I had to invent a continuum it runs from "no-holds-barred t-rex thunderdome (with more dino species added by enterprising players!)" to "roleplayers so obsessed with the idea of AUTHENTICALLY rping a dinosaur that they have multi-page pamphlets for every single species listing out everything they are and are not allowed to do all the way down to what bodies of water it is permissible to drink out of". The joking-but-not-a-joke I shared with my friends upon first meeting the deeper end of the RPer scale was that these dinosaur roleplayers make MMORPG cop RPers look like casuals. (To the uninitiated this is devastating. My friends were terrified.) This also doesn't entirely surprise me because, look, there's a kind of person out there who will UM AKSHUALLY you about the most minor dinosaur trivia possible. Teach them what text roleplaying is and voila, here are your detailed rules including a PvP priority order five bullet points long about how Giganotosaurus hates Carcharodontosaurus the most but when there's none of those around it can hunt apex carnivores UNLESS there's any sauropods or hadrosaurs around in which case it has to try to eat the saurpods or hadrosaurs first, but only if the sauropods or hadrosaurs are not full-grown adults.
PSYCH! I got that Giganoto hunt priority list from a SEMI-realism server! Semi-realism servers are for casuals who are not committed to the true experience of roleplaying a dinosaur and thus have far fewer rules. Their main rules documents only totalled about 20 pages in google sheets, excepting the individual dino rules which are stored in their discord server. Each dino has 1-3 pages of individual rules. Casuals.
Now that I have distracted and horrified(/tempted) you with a glimpse into the void, you have forgotten to ask an important question: if there's such wild variety in the community servers, how do you look around for one your actually want to play on?
That's the fun part!
You get NO help with that!
Every community multiplayer is listed in an enormous jumble in the Server List pane. It shows the host region (for internet lag/language purposes) and if any of your game-friends are logged into it, then server name, number of players online, and then which map it is. The players online number is useful for assessing out how popular it is right then (and whether it's too full to join)... and the map kinda sorta matters depending on whether you care about some stuff. But in terms of "does this server have the player-enforced rules I am interested in" your only hint is, at most, the server name. All servers want to name themself something flavorful or cool but if they're careful with their character count they can wedge some jargon in there to give you SOME idea what they're about. "Veloccis Realm 10xG 20xM" is advertising ten-times faster Growth and twenty-times Marks rewards (ie coins. I Can't Believe They're Not Gold Coins). "Blazing Plains Realism" is
Because the server name field has nowhere near enough space for the semaphore to cover all bases, your best-case scenario is to find some promising leads and then one by one connect to them and read their rules splash page. If, upon reading, you do not feel moved to click the "I Agree" and play there, you get to back out to the Server List again and try the next one.
Or more likely, go "hey wait what was the next one I wanted to look at called, heck, why is the list in a totally different order now so it's not listed anymore?" and spend thirty seconds scrolling up and down the list, trying to remember the term de arte that led you you looking at it, putting that into the Search field to bring it up by name, then waiting for the Server List to actually let you refresh it because to save bandwidth you are only allowed to refresh the server list every 6 seconds at most (2006-ass design). Trying to scroll to another page of the list requires this rate-limited refresh btw (2006-ass design).
If you think this promotes joining servers haphazardly just because fighting the UI is too irritating to put up with for long, that was certainly my experience!
And again, just because you find a community multiplayer server you maybe-hopefully want to play on doesn't mean you're done. Anything which isn't a lawless wasteland definitionally has rules, which means you need to go read those rules. (No, really– even if you hate authority you probably don't want to be chain-banned because you have no idea why people are yelling "bd" in global chat.) If you're lucky the mandatory Discord will at least put all the rules in one spot. But don't worry, even if your taste is lawless wastelands, they still want you to join their Discord server. And probably still have at least a few rules you'll be chain-kicked for unknowingly violating if you don't read carefully.
So your reward for wanting to play dinos so badly you'll shell out $7-30 for it is hunting through the Classifieds with a magnifying glass until, at last, you get to... do a bunch of homework. And almost certainly join a Discord server.
...
Now that I have roasted Path of Titans for 2,100 words, you may think, surely this means Wobbles hates it? Unfortunately dear reader (and you are quite dear if you made it this far) I really... really... REALLY want to play dinos. I want to play a funny ostrich or a chicken nugget with legs or a Nessie. I want to crest the hill as a 20-foot-tall Edward Scissorhands bird to watch the sun rise. I want to dip my tiny sauropod head in a pond to drink water among reeds that barely come up to my elbows. I want to weave between boulders at a sprint, sunlight hitting my dimetrodon sail, as I look for chipmunks to snack on. I want to snooze on a hillside picking out a pretty new scale pattern. I want to roam a map I've never seen slowly learning where the best food and questing is.
And for all the other hassles PoT besets me with, it does offer me these things.
So when I watched a couple videos on youtube of some stranger having fun in PoT I reinstalled it. This time around I had a much better idea of what the semaphore in the community server names meant; I also had the time to analyze the servers at my leisure and be more persistent about finding one that fit me. I alternated reading reams of damn rules with messing around a little bit in the actual world. I googled basic gameplay questions, checked controls/options, found the non-fandom wiki and left guides open to consult as I played. This time, unlike my first brief foray, I invested the effort to get truly comfortable instead of hoping I'd frictionlessly land somewhere good.
And now? I've led my friend, both of us shrieking, between a gap in the boulders too tiny for the chasing t-rex to follow us through. I've hatched from another player's nest and followed them halfway across the map to a verdant haven where I grew up strong enough to make the journey back home. I've laid in the bushes perfectly unmoving as a pair of dilophosaurs hunted past me, intent on the enormous triceratops I could hear but not see. I've beachcombed in the gloom of pouring rain, counting on the dim and fog to hide me while I rushed quests to grow up that much faster. I've crept after a hunting rex, wondering if it knew I was there, only to watch it break into a sprint to close on a sleeping spinosaurus, and now I had a front-row seat to the ensuing fight.
The effort to find a server or three I care to play on is so easily forgotten once I'm actually playing. Once there's friendly strangers offering groups for fun and protection. Once I can send a silly screenshot of other people horsing around to the Discord's photo gallery and get half a dozen strangers laughing in emoji along with it.
At which point I have not been lying about what gameplay is comprised of (walking simulator-ass game) but as long as I'm a parasaurolophus or whatever it's fun to simply exist in a virtual world. And by gum, Path of Titans will give you that.
I conclude this post about playing dinosaurs by mentioning Path of Titans has a Recruit A Friend system. If you too want to play dinos after reading this post, you can get a free appearance for one dino (and gift it to me too in the process!) by listing me as your referrer. Either put this code in as your referrer: 687-936-386
... or follow this link and then buy the game: https://alderongames.com/refer-a-friend/687-936-386
(If you get lost trying to navigate this silly system, please see the official Recruit-A-Friend FAQ for explanations, info and links.)
(Disclaimer: in case it's not obvious, I believe you should not play dinos if you don't want to play dinos. RAF code provided only on the off chance someone reads this and inexplicably thinks "huh, I DO want to play dinos!" because the pretty suchomimus skin is very pretty.)