A Tale in the Desert The Sandy Old MMO

By Remko Molenaar (Proxzor), OnRPG Journalist Have you always been fascinated by the work of Egyptians? eGenesis introduces you to A Tale in the Desert and will show you how people in the old Egypt crafted tools and handled their own business. Instead of killing monsters and gaining equipment and other features a normal MMORPG possesses, A Tale in the Desert teaches you how to craft your own set of tools to create items that you might need to unlock new technology.When you first start up the game and make yourself a new character it is time to learn the basics of A Tale in the Desert. You will start to learn how to gather wood and learn some other important crafting options through one of the schools or universities that are scattered all over the map. You can visit these schools that will help you learn to create some helpful tools. Leveling up your skills is done by crafting the same object over and over; after a while your character gets the hang of it and its success rate to craft that item will be higher.After the short tutorial you are given a list that you will need to find and create. After you have done everything that is put on the list, you will be an official citizen and can join the community in various projects. The crafting in this game is very easy, fun to use, and not terribly difficult to learn. For example, slate is found near water and with two pieces of slate you can make yourself a Stone Blade. With this Stone Blade and some wood you can make yourself a wood plane. This wood plane is useful for making wooden planks that can be used for other crafting recipes.Every skill and project that you have obtained is found by clicking on your character. Here a list of all available actions is presented in one easy menu. This also includes your fluff skills such as emotes. And if you want to change the looks of your character you can head over to the appearance tab to edit your avatar. If you are lost you can activate a compass along with using the positioning of the sun to find your way. Of course for the less adventurous, coordinates are provided to give you a general idea where you are on the world map.In the bottom left of your screen you can find your item menu. In the Items list you can find the items that you have gathered and have created in the world of A Tale in the Desert. You will also see how much you are carrying with you in terms of weight and bulk. Next to the items is a skill tab which allows you to keep track of your various skill progressions. There are so many skills in this game it made my head spin so you’ll be glad to have such a well presented menu organizing them all for you.Overall the objective of the game is simple. Do what you want! As a sandbox game you are free to just have fun and try to achieve whatever goal you care about at the time. If you are one of the hardcore players, you can aim to become to top of one of the seven schools and even gain a say in how the next iteration of the world will be designed after the world reaches its conclusion and resets. Currently A Tale in the Desert is just beginning Tale 5 so there’s still time to aim for the top.A tale in the Desert is quite an old game already and the graphics show this off. The game isn’t really looking that great and feels a little empty. Even though you have to create most of the environment yourself it feels a little dull and boring. To play this sandbox game you will need to have a Pentium 700Mhz processor along with 512 MB of RAM. You will also need to have at least a Geforce MX or a Radeon 9600+ video card in your rig running. If you have no idea what this means and you have no idea what kind of computer you’re currently running right now. I’d say everyone with a computer that is made in the last 10 years is easily able to run this game without any trouble.A Tale in the Desert is a fun game to learn about Ancient Egypt. The crafting element is everything in this game and designed well enough to keep you entertained for hours. Once in a while the world will reset itself and the law that is made up by all the players is deleted and started over so this game has a different outcome every time. Unfortunately there are still things that annoyed me during my play. The camera physics are ancient, unwieldy, and downright frustrating to maneuver. For looking around you have to place your mouse at the edge of your screen and looking up or down is not possible. A Tale in the Desert is a fun game but there’s no way it can compete in today’s market as a P2P game. Nonetheless A Tale in the Desert is a fun game to play that will teach you some history about the old Egypt, and lets you socialize with others in a way that doesn’t involve bashing heads in for once.