Ooook, so these are my impressions of this game.
It seems like it will have a somewhat grindy nature. Your skills go up with use, and to build stuff you need to gather materials and such, so it will definitely be one of those games where you spend hours gathering materials and grinding just to up your skills.
However, the end result is much different from farming materials on - for example - WOW. The end result is not some purple sword, the end result is that the environment around you changes, a bunch of grass turns to a bunch of buildings, a heavily forested wood is partially chopped down to make space for a paved road, a field becomes ready to be harvested and so on. I know these are not unique features, but the way they all blend together and the way the world is made “believable” is pretty unique, as far as my limited knowledge of this kind of games goes.
The combat system seems clunky for now, but I didn’t have a lot of chances to try it extensively. It’s sort of a Mount & Blade-esque combat, but clunkier. You swing, and if your weapon physically connects with your target, then it hits and deals damage, otherwise you miss. It takes a bit to get accustomed to, but when you do, it’s relatively intuitive. However, it sometimes (often) feels like you should have hit the guy, and you don’t. Server-client issues maybe or who knows.
But where this game really shines is in its crafting/trading compartment. The devs already said that the finished product will have a hard cap for skills, so you’ll have to choose your trade, and until now that has turned out to be a lot of fun. While I usually dislike grindy gameplay, in this case you know that the end result of your work will be an actual change in the game world, and it’s not THAT grindy anyway. Even flattening the ground for an hour becomes enjoyable once your shitty shack is set up and all the work rewarded.
Being able to grow crops, trees, breed animals, work metals, weave, etc, etc, becomes a mean to an end, and the fact that things are so much easier if players cooperate is a potentially good sign for a half-decent economy.
That’s why I like the idea of buying new characters rather than paying a subscription. If you want a lot of characters so you can be “independent” from other players, it’s going to cost you. I would actually make it so that your second character costs twice the first, and the third twice the second, etc.
It’s of course still an alpha and there’s a lot of technical glitches and stuff like that and I don’t care addressing it here because, you know, alpha. But the idea behind this is good and if well implemented and refined it could make for a p. fun game.
Yeah game looks interesting, hooray for another chronically underfunded sandbox game, I can't fucking wait.
they said that with all the early access they've already turned a profit
