TLDR; The game is a old-school MMO with no hand holding and full player freedom to customize your character with any combination of the more than 30 unique combat skill lines avaliable. It has open ended progression where you can choose how and what you want to do to progress. Many extremely unique skill lines: just some being a cow, gaint bat, or psychologist that kills enemies by insulting them. A MASSIVE amount of content from 7 years of early access development, with more than 11 full zones to explore, and an extremely helpful and loving community where the devs treat the game like a passion and not a job. It has a free demo, so if you're on the edge, just try that out, but give it at least an hour, as every flaw the game has is visible within the first 15 minutes. Full review: I bought this game a week ago, a the time very skeptical. When I first lauched the game, I had some pretty bad screen blur when moving my camera and that almost caused me to refund it. However, I decided to join the discord and seek help. Almost immediately, a developer came and helped me through my problem, despite the time crunch he was on for release in just a week. Because of this, I gave the game a proper shot and my God, am I glad I did. What this dev team has built is not just a unique and engaging MMO, but also a community of helpful, and passionate players always willing to help. First, let's talk about the negatives, there aren't many but every one of them is visible and clear in the first hour of gameplay, so I want to get them out off the way. 1: The sound design: Let's get the big one out of the way. The sound design is absolutely terrible; some sounds, such as the spider death noise, are way too loud and very jarring to hear. Others are extremely repetitve, such as the music players can play, it's annoying, but you get over it and hopefully this will be improved in future. 2: The performance: For a game that looks like this, you would imagine it'd be able to run on any rig. But even with a high end PC, you will have trouble running it on max settings. The lower settings can run fine but you're going to sacrifice an already not great looking game to make it look worse. 3: The graphics: The game doesn't look terrible if you can run it on high, but how good the game looks varies DRASTICALLY depending on the time of day and zone you are in. Sometimes, I find myself looking at a grass filled field at night with the worst Anti Aliasing I have ever seen. Other times, I find myself emerging from a cave when the sunrise hits the lake just right, stopping to take in the view. And that's it, literally every negative from the game comes from fixable things that the devs just need to focus on in the future, none of it is gameplay related. Now for the good stuff, and oh boy there is a lot going for this game. 1: The community: This game has one of the nicest and most welcoming communities I've ever seen. Every question I had was answered within minutes, and any time I needed help with something, a veteran player would be there to get me out of a tight spot. I think a big part of why this community is so great is how connected the developer is with it. Never in my life have I seen a dev get on chat in his own game because: "He needed to take a break from coding." He literally plays his own game, engaging with the community as a break. It's such a breath of fresh air and wonderful to see. The game is truly not just a job, but a passion for him and the other developers. 2: The customization: This game sports over 30 skill lines, with the ability to combo almost any two together, making your own custom playstyle. Ever wanted to be a Arctic hare? Combo the bunny transformation/skill line with ice magic! An extremely judgmental preist? Combo preist with psychology and ridicule your enemies to death after you stop and get them to open up about their mother. Or perhaps you want to just be an archer with a giant pet bear? Well combo archery with animal handling. Almost anything you can think off, this game says "go ahead kiddo" and it is beautiful. 3: No hand holding: This could be a positive or a negative depending on who you are. The game has no quest markers. You will talk to a npc and they will tell you what they want or need and it's up to you to figure out how to do it, but that is what makes this game so fun. Someone asking you to bring them "a rhino horn" turns from a quest marker where you go and kill something, to a adventure where you explore the map in search of a rhino with your friends. Along the way, you will find other quests to pick up. While one quest might take you hours to figure it out, other times you will find a guy asking you to get his missing shield, only to have it already found it while exploring on a previous adventure. The game truly feels like a journey, with every quest you complete feeling like you earned it. 4: The gear: Gearing in this game feels similar to an ARPG, but without the annoyances. Every item that drops can have anywhere from 3-5 effect on it. They range from simple damage increases; turning a skill from phychic to fire, or maybe making a skill AOE instead of single target. There are so many modifiers for each skill line; the higher your level, the more start showing up. Now this may sound like you would be spending hours sorting through useless items in your inventory because of this, but no. Every piece of gear that drops for you will only have modifiers for the 2 skills you have equipped, making gear drops more rare, but every one of them a potential upgrade. Not only that, but if you get a piece of gear that has just 1 really good modifier on it, you can extract it to put it on a later piece of gear, or vise versa. If you get the perfect piece with 1 terrible modifier, you can swap that out for one you want. 5: The perfect balance between diffculty and punishment: The game is hard, and with no hand holding. There are many mistakes you can make. However, to counteract this, the only death punishment is being sent back to the nearest spawn point, or the beginning of a dungeon (unless you enable hardcore or ultra hardcore mode, completely optional). What this does is allow this difficulty to help you learn from every death, without detering you from trying again. It's an extremely well designed system that allows exploration without punishment. The one exception is bosses. Every boss, (with a comedically obvious warning) has a curse it will apply to you during the fight as a mechanic, the only way to get rid of which is to defeat the boss. If you die, you're stuck with it until you go back to defeat it. HOWEVER, whenever this happens with a boss that you were not ready to fight, someone will always come to assist you if you ask in help chat. I have never had to wait more than 10 minutes maximum for a veteran player. This also incentivizes community and cooperation; while this can feel very punishing, I think it's ultimately a positive for the game. Some of the curses even come with buffs, so players keep them on purpose. 6: Crafting: There's a lot of crafting professions in the game. So many that I can barely speak on the matter, except for what I have engaged with (gardening and cooking). But just know that the crafting in this game is very lucrative and fun, with tons of professions to choose from and a player driven economy. 7: Fable style humor: The game is funny, constantly likes to subvert expectations (but not so much that it gets stale), with some jokes that GENUINELY made me laugh out loud. If mature British style humour is your kind of humour, this game is going to give you a kick. All in all, the game is an incredibly unique experience, made with love and passion. I would recommend any fan of old school MMOs at least give the demo a good try.
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