I have been immersed in video games for 15 years, and for the past 8 years I have spent the majority of my free time playing MMORPGs, MMOBAs and FPS games. I've spent a lot of hours, and a lot of my money, on video games, and to this day purchasing "Forge" on Steam for 20 dollars is the most unsatisfying purchase I have made. I've played tens of thousands of hours in a vast array of game titles ranging from mainstream World of Warcraft, Everquest and Aion to games like Rappelz, Day of Defeat and Threadspace:Hyperbole, and I've purchased thousands of dollars in digital content within games, and nothing to date has even come close to the disappointment I felt after the first hour and a half of Forge. The feeling is equivalent to realizing you have just been robbed. Forge is the epitome of a game giving itself credit where credit is not due, hyping up features that it doesn't deliver. Make no mistake about it, If you buy Forge you are basically giving its developers and steam a 20 dollar gift just for having come up with the idea of the game, NOT for turning that idea into a product. I don't want anyone to make the mistake of handing over their hard earned money to these thieves, and I beg you not to doubt it, It WOULD be a mistake.
I don't know how they sleep at night, there is no way I would be able to allow the public to pay me this much money for this kind of quality in a product. I would love to give you a list of the problems in this game, but i could not begin to cover all of them. Instead I will give you a list of better ways to spend your 20 dollars. Consider balling it up and dampening it at your nearest water source then flinging it at walls. You could use it as paper to make origami cranes. You could break your twenty into twenty single bills, and fold them in half to use as a decorative memo pad. You could use it as a shock absorber to add to the insoles of your shoes. You could hang it on a branch outside and tell all your friends you own a money tree, and these are just a few of the many ways you could spend your money rather than buying Forge.
Forge is just one big steaming pile of unbalanced, underdeveloped, garbage. This is supposed to be a class based MMORPG styled PvP game. But it fundamentally lacks even the most basic of systems to balance this PvP. I'm not even referring to class balance yet, but don't worry, there isn't any of that either. It won't take any experienced PvPer more than a couple of matches in Forge to notice some giant issues, such as how the random number of players on either team, lacking a fully developed system for team balancing, makes getting a balanced match completely impossible. Or how the "Pyromancer" mage class which deals the highest damage out of all of them, has autotargeting and the best mobility skill in the game has a ridiculous advantage over every other class, and when you are on an assassin you feel like a blind man swinging twigs at unseen opponents miles away, and no surprise, missing. If you want a really accurate overview of what this "game" is, Forge is basically just a new instance of a modern gaming engine, displaying modern graphics to give you the start of 5 undeveloped generic character classes, with random skills that you can run around with, nothing in it is well thought out, nothing in it is well developed. I wish I could think of an example of another game to compare to Forge to give you an idea of just how bad this PvP is, but I can't. I literally cannot think of another game that offers PvP, in which the PvP is this bad. If you guys come up with one, let me know.
How about the fact that even though all your enemies display an HP bar above their heads, there is no option anywhere in the game to allow you to display your own hp bar above your head. However there is a unique graphical option which allows you to put your computer's cpu to work to turn Forge's decent graphics into a cluster fuck view through an 8-bit collideoscope.
I really wanted Forge to be what it looked like. I really wanted Forge to be a success, there is a hole in the videogame market for a genre that this title claimed to fill, a game offering the full experience of rich MMORPG style PvP combat, without the tedious hassle of regular MMO grinding fulfilling pointless quests and killing countless mobs that only respawn again two seconds after you kill them so that you can kill them some more, and I feel like the developers of Forged must have known this to. Only instead of filling that gap they just took advantage of its existence, by creating a lot of media for a game that looks the part, but in the end putting out a product that just doesn't cut it.
The word "game" is commonly defined as "A form of play or sport" (just type it into Google if you don't believe me) the fourth word there, Play, is key because it implies the idea of fun, or enjoyment. Make no mistake, this "game" is not fun, and it is not likely to bring you any enjoyment. By virtue of this knowledge, in my opinion Forge does not even qualify as a "game" at all, and I have known this subconsciously since that first hour in Forge, and have been able to feel the sting of having been stolen from ever since.
If you are considering buying Forge because you want to play a fun, fast paced MMORPG style PvP game, I suggest you first, take the 20 dollars that you would spend on Forge, set it on fire, and place it at the bottom of an empty rubbish bin. Then go download free online multiplayer checkers. You will be far more satisfied with this arrangement than you would have been with Forge.
If I had to choose one word to describe Forge, it would be disappointment. You see realistically I cannot say that this is the worst game there ever was, that would be like saying a Neo Geo is the worst car there has ever been - but the Model T did exist before it, and yet when the Model T came out it was exciting and satisfying, the Neo Geo on the other hand is just a piece of crap. Forge is like that. I can't say it's the worst game ever but I can honestly say it is the most disappointing.
Comments
When did forge become an MMO? Last I saw it was limited as to the amount of players (like TF2).
*Edit - Just checked. Not an MMO. Has MMO style combat/skills. That seems to be the only connection.
That is a lot of blah blah without much substance.
Do the classes need some balancing? Of course, but that is the ongoing case in every pvp game. Of course a good deal of the balance problem is down to perception; the other guy is always op. Strange that you would have such issues with the assassin and pyromancer. 1) Don't stand in front of the guy chucking fire. 2) The assassin depends on stealth and positioning; you're not a tank.
Otherwise the game is in early stages (almost as though it were a new game *shocking*) but headed in the right direction.
Many games have elements that have been inspired by MMO's, but it doesn't mean they belong in an MMO forum if they are not an MMO. There is a games forum just below the MMO forum. If we worked by that logic single player games like Kingdoms of Amular would be in this forum as its quests are totally MMO style.