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Dynamight Studios Invites Gamers to Try Fractured During the End of Year Open Playtest December 30th
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Dynamight Studios Invites Gamers to Try Fractured During the End of Year Open Playtest December 30th | MMORPG.com
It's the end of the year, and Dynamight Studios wants to end 2020 and start 2021 by inviting players to join them for a free Fractured open play test that starts December 30th 2020 to January 3rd 2021. All registered players will be able to get into the game and check it out, and for those that rank high enough in one of several contests will win a Winter Alpha Key.
Comments
It really feels like "A Game About Nothing™" to be perfectly honest. You enter the world of the first time, there is no guide, no questgiver NPC to greet you or some window to pop up to give you some hints on what to do or where to go.
The world is empty except for some mobs and places dedicated to crafting.
There isn't much to do besides harvesting the flora and fauna for resources and then crafting things. This is really the essence of the whole game at this point.
I playtested it 2 or 3 times, I vividly remember once in February 2020 and once around October-November 2020, both time it felt like almost zero progress has been made during that time.
I seriously despise these new Sandbox games where they just throw in PvP and Crafting and call it a "Sandbox MMO" when there is literally nothing else to do in the game and the aspects and mechanics of the game are absolutely barebones.
well considering Ultima Online has been chugging along for 20+ years? I think it'll do just fine. Some people don't want a game to hold their hand, we have WOW and all the copies of that for those people that want to be coddled throughout their gaming experience.
Apparently you've never played Ultima or survival type games?
LOL. The moment you started assuming things it lowered your opinion's credibility below zero.
I have played Ultima Online and many other survival games like ARK, ATLAS, Conan Exiles and Savage Lands.
Ultima was OK for its time and to this day it's mostly played by veteran players who played it since 1997 and it's their first and most precious MMO, but hardly there are any newcomers who never played UO before and are just starting. This game, Fractured, may catch the attention of UO players looking for something new, but even they may not keep playing it for long.
Keep in mind that UO was a lot more than just Crafting and PvP. Fractured in comparison is absolutely barebones with almost no features whatsoever. It's a game about nothing.
The way you word your opinion it sounds like you got traumatized by Themepark games like WoW and they some how trigger you into a blind rage. xD
Have you even played Fractured before? Because I have and as I said - compared to UO it has nothing on it. It's kinda the same situation as with Legends of Aria (ex Shards Online) - big promises and in the end it's just one bad fart in the wind.
On their website they describe it as "Sandbox" rather than "survival". Survival IMO would mean a game where you have to manage more stats than just your Health and Mana points, but also:
- Temperature
- Hunger
- Energy/Stamina
- Mood
- etc.
My gripe is that lately, in the last couple of years most of these indie MMOs are always "Sandbox" and they always end up being just a randomly generated barren and mediocre world with almost nothing on it and PvP and Crafting thrown together. This just isn't enough to qualify as an MMO and I consider it a lazy attempt on the developers' side to try and sell a half-assed product as a full-featured MMO. Because money is not their problem, it's their lack of creativity - creating custom, hand-crafted environments like a village or a skeleton-infested dungeon with a Necromancer boss on the lowest floor takes effort and creativity and these developers just don't have it in them. They "just provide the tools" and expect players to create the rest of the game for them. A good analogy would be for you to be willing to pay your employer so he can make you work. A good example of an indie MMORPG by a small group of developers is Reign of Darkness, which is attempting to be an old school MMORPG borrowing ideas from AD&D, Diablo 2, ArcheAge, EverQuest, WoW, etc. And the game which originally had just one developer had tons of hand-crafted content as well as quests, which shows real dedication despite all the shortcomings of the game and lack of content, but whatever content there is, it just looks and feels like a person made it from start to end. And that's what counts in my book as real effort.
We don't all like the same things... all the things you wrote as cons are things I enjoy.
There really is no reason to prop up one indie game and dump on another. You can think the way you do and that's fine but comparing Reign of Darkness to the games you did while trashing Legends of Aria does not make sense cause LOA is closer to those games than Reign.. Reign is a one zone Unity asset game made by one guy with a lot of heart. It has no housing, crafting, economy and even players at this point. I really enjoyed the game for the $20 I spent on it and I agree with what you said that he put real effort into the project.
I do like the basics of this game but playing -one- week investing my time into this is just not worth it at all. this game requires time investment and you can not enjoy this game knowing whatever you do , you will not reach any "fun" point before youre play time is over.
When they add the other races and alow a real-real-real open beta of a month or two then its worth trying. in order to gain a growing player-base and gain more publicity they realy need to make some sort of free-to-test model with level caps. try it, reach youre cap, decide if you want to buy a cap-unlock beta-test package.
The developers of Fractured aren't doing much to set their game apart from anything. And since we're talking about Unity assets, the UI of Fractured is straight up from the Unity Store, they didn't even bother to customize it. As I said for the 3rd time - Fractured's problem is that it has a large world with no content, all there is is crafting and PvP and that's not enough for an MMO. I'm not saying there should be quest chains akin to a theme park MMO, but there should be other things to do other than crafting and fighting other players. For example if an MMO was just questing and nothing else, no crafting, no PvP, no PvE - Dungeons/Raids, just questing it would be the same lackluster experience I'm seeing in Fractured. There just need to be more things.
If you don't agree with my take on Legends of Aria, you can look at pretty much everyone else's opinion on it, both on the official forums and Steam.
Also Reign of Darkness now has a second zone that's as big as 3 Barrenses (from WoW) stitched together and a couple of new dungeons in it. It's almost completely populated with NPCs, quests and mobs, they are already working on a 3rd zone of the size of this 2nd zone. The 2nd zone is already available in the game and everyone can visit it and quest there. As for housing I don't even know if it's on their to-do list. Housing for me is an unimportant feature so I can easily go without it, but it may be very important for others.
Despite Reign of Darkness being small in scale at the moment, the little content it has is more vast than that of Fractured...
Why?
Because:
- you have lots of quests to do
- you can play a Tarot game
- you can run 5 dungeons on various difficulties
- you have class combinations and you can theorycraft and experiment with different class builds
- you can craft
- you can PvP
In Fractured you can:
- gather crafting resources from the flora and fauna
- craft
- PvP
That's it.
This type of olive branch to include PvE players has been tried before once they get us in they will change the rules. I recall with bitterness how they promoted Aion.
I like all the games you mentioned in your example:
- LOA is the spiritual counterpart of UO - at one point I considered buying that, but after I got too familiarized with it I decided it was not a good investment
- Inferna - the Metin2 Online clone - it had close to 2000 player surge at launch, I was actually hyping that game, because I used to play Metin2 back in 2008 and I hoped this one would recapture the spirit, but the developers were too much out of touch to know how what to do and here we are today - their game is way past its prime and most of its population are ignorant people who don't even know what they're getting themselves into
- Tale of Toast - game made between two developers, I actually was interested it at one point, I don't remember why. The developers just missed so many opportunities and focused on aspects they cared rather than what their community did, which is a shame
- Reign of Darkness - 5 people playing it
- Project Gorgon - made by 2 people - 150 people playing it (also surfaced around the same time Reign of Darkness did in 2013), I considered buying it recently, but the game is very clunky and performance was bad for the type of visuals it provided
The only defensive statement I can say about Reign of Darkness is that players are waiting for more content, including me. If they don't provide that in the coming 6 months, the population will NEVER pick up and people will just lose interest in the game, including me. So don't think like I have some special attachment to it, I give it as a good example of an indie MMO that *STILL* has potential, after that card is played, you will see me giving Reign of Darkness as a bad example of what developers *SHOULD NOT DO* with their MMO and how they *SHOULD NOT* waste their potential. Yes, once last winter I bought a copy of Reign of Darkness, because it was cheap and I didn't know what to expect, I was hopeful, I still am to a certain extent that content will come and it will warrant people staying and population increasing, but I also got realistic estimations that things *MAY NEVER* pick up and it will remain a mediocre passion project with 5-10 people playing it forever and that's it. But as I said, a lot of players on their Discord are lying dormant, waiting for more content to release to finally start playing the game, so when that massive zone gets finished, either lots of players will start playing or things will remain like this forever, only to get worse. So I don't really care what happens to Reign of Darkness it may get better or worse, but one feature that keeps me hopeful is they plan to implement Randomzied Dungeons, which means you won't experience any dungeon the same way twice and if they pull it off, they might become the only MMORPG that does this, but if they fail, no skin off my back, I only paid 16 EUR for it on Steam so it doesn't change much for me.
Well, PvE requires more actual content, which this game doesn't have. Of course they will go the route of the Gankbox instead - because players will be too busy constantly looking behind their backs (or the edges of their screen in this case) to care about content.
EVE is a bold choice for a counterpart and an overkill at that. Comparing anything to EVE is death.