Fractured MMO Thoughts

The Fractured mmo fall alpha test has now been live about a week. I have been honestly enjoying it. While there is not a whole lot to do currently in game, you can tell the foundation for something magical is there.

Currently in the fall alpha they added mounts(horses currently), cart systems, expanded town system, crafting builds for the town, new legends which are boss type things, more abilities and mobs, and enchanting/smithing.

The game foundation in game is currently amazing for what it wants to be which gives me great hope it can achieve this.

Upon release the game plans to have multiple races, 3 worlds, multiple continents, robust town, housing, crafting, taming and learning systems, robust pvp.

Of the 3 worlds, one will be pve focused, one pure pvp, and one a mix of the two with political pvp. Giving options for every type of player in these sandbox style mmos.

Another unique thing it does is, there is no xp you gain. You get knowledge points for monsters, and from monsters you learn new abilities you can use for your char. You start with a few basic abilities and have to go out, explore and learn the rest.

There is no blue, green, purples. There is no color system. The material you use to craft determines some of its values. Then the robust enchanting system lets you further customize and improve your weapon and gear.

It is currently in fall alpha test until December 4th. You can sometimes find streamers or youtubers with keys to try it out, or you can use their website to buy a package that grants access to it.

I do stream it here: https://www.twitch.tv/mhmaddingo

and I have videos on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEcP61kaD-8YW1KxpCWMrXw/featured?view_as=subscriber

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SamuTale sandbox mmo free trial

Samutale is currently running a free trial on their website: https://www.samutale.com/ to try out the game.

The same is a sandbox survival type mmo that is similar to the old version of tree of life. Fans of that will probably enjoy this. It also has a samurai type setting.

You can build actual houses like archeage that one can go inside and place furnishings in. As well as build walls and other objects around their place.

You can tame mounts, animals, farm, gather, craft, hunt and various other type of things similar to games of this nature.

It is also full pvp with loot drop on death. Check it out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm9IUzj5hcY

Video Review of New Survival Games!

New World Review

New World is an mmo by Amazon Games and is currently doing a preview until 9/4/2020. This review is based off that. To start, this is the build that would have released back in may and again in august on the 25th if they had not decided to delay it using covid as an excuse.

The character customization options are horrible. They feel like a 90s rpg in terms of how limited options you have. But hey, atleast females can have facial hair right? From that you get a fun little cutscene and then a basic combat tutorial that takes you to the starter quest person.

The world itself looks beautiful. However, there is no jump. It is 2020 and a 3d mmo has no jump is just a sin and should not be allowed. The combat is wonky and off. It feels like they wanted to make dark souls combat, but then realized it was too hard for them to play so they butchered it to whatever this is. Blocking only works half the time. The moving up on objects does not work half the time, which would be solved with…a jump button.

The quests are so standard and boring. They also take you to the same locations from level 1 up thru end game. You will for the entire time of your pve leveling be going to the same spots over and over. Killing 20 mobs and looting 10 chests. Hardly any variance at all.

The mobs are the same models over and over. There is so little variance that by level 10 you’ve seen 90 percent of the mobs you’ll fight all game already.

The leveling is also horrendous because someone thinks that when you invite 500 million players in a game at once, you need 5 minute timers for one mob spawn. Seriously, who does not understand mob timers? Even uo and eq did not have this mob spawn problem.

The game is not hard. Infact what makes it hard, is having to wait 2 hours to complete a kill 10 mob quest because there are so many trying to kill the 10 mobs and they take 5 plus minutes to spawn.

No mounts exist, and your fast travel is pretty limited. So you will be running alot. For along time. All game.

I feel like they left the mob spawns so slow and all this walking to hide the fact the game lacks content.

The magic staves are cool, but only two exist. Magic almost feels like an after thought added to the game, but magic and ranged combat tends to be the most op in terms of mob killing.

The pvp system is a joke. It is flag pvp and there is zero point to pvp or flag. The end game pvp is 50v50 instanced siege that is basically wow battlegrounds, but with a lottery system that you may not get picked for. So pvp is basically absent from a game that promotes pvp as a core feature.

End game pve is one “boss”. That is it.

Crafting feels like it could be good, but it is missing something. Like a lot of something. It really does not feel important or impactful in the current state of the game.

The housing system where you have houses in the world is pretty cool, but also pointless really and might as well be instanced housing like final fantasy xiv.

This game needs about 2-3 years more of actual work for it to be anywhere near decent.

Here is a video review of it here: https://youtu.be/hZJSOMoKCEg

Grounded Ea Launch Review

Grounded by Obsidian Entertainment has officially launched into early access with a decent pricetag of 30usd. This game is set in the genre of survival sandbox and uses xbox services for its multiplayer.

Many “issues” negative reviewers have complained about are simply silly. Co op works and you simply need to use the same login you do for windows. The game launches fine from steam.

The current main story quest in the game is currently rather short, however, there is tons of things to do as it is a survival game. Tons of other quests, things to explore and find, things to learn to craft as well as an interesting building system.

The setting and world and graphics of the game are incredible and really make you feel like you are shrunk down and wandering around a backyard at the size of a bug. The way you chop down grass, find rocks, use insect parts as well as the basic other things is just really well done.

There are no levels in the game and instead you use a research device to unlock new recipes by bringing things you find to it. You can also get new ideas for recipes by crafting or finding things.

The building is interesting and I can see some crazy bases being built with the system they have. It is similar to other games like the forest or green hell in how it is done.

The enemy ai does have a few bugs to work out, but for instance if you kill enough ants a giant force of ants will come for you. This is the type of AI I do enjoy in survival games.

While the price tag for many at 30usd is steep for an ea game and I do understand the why, but the game itself is currently loaded with fun for survival genre fans with a story added on as a bonus.

V4 Nexons Autoplay MMO Review

So V4 global launch happened and I tried it out. It launched for mobile and pc in the NA and Euro markets. The game seems to be a direct copy almost of BDO Mobile. Like Direct Copy.

From the start the character classes are gender locked with only limited presets available to “customize” your character and make it your own. Character names are limited to 8 letters or so even. Really really limiting most identity one may have. And in an mmo your identity can mean the world.

I was hoping for more but this game is basically autoplay on everything. From combat, to quests, to gathering crafting materials to infusing and other things. You can literally auto everything and do nothing.

Even boss fights are easily autoed with zero engagement. The only engagement you really have to do is clicking complete quest and accepting the new quest. Then it auto does everything else for you.

While I do realize it was made with mobile as the main focus, it is just kind of sad. You would expect to need to do some playing yourself.

If you have ever played Endless World Idle RPG this is basically that but in a “mmo” form. If that is your thing I am sure you will enjoy it. But for the majority of mmo players it is sorely going to be lacking well everything.

I do however like the camera options one can do. But outside of that there is not really much to like or enjoy about this horrible entry into the mmo genre. The cash shop is loaded with high priced packs for launch as well. They are totally focused on the micros and yes there is some p2w elements involved here. But one could most likely do fine with being totally f2p but it would take you along time to do all the upgrades you would need to be competitive that way.

So to recap if you are a fan of idle games this may be waay up your alley. Otherwise I doubt many will really enjoy it.

Here is some gameplay video from my stream to see for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sc_EwOm5Gs

Atlas new “map” update

Atlas continues to betray its user base even a year and a half later. They released a “new map” update of 74 mbs.. Yes an entire new map that is so changed it was only 74 mbs. I think warcraft 3 had bigger map download sizes than that.

They did not fix or change anything except to shrink the map. The map name is still ocean and nothing new like they kept calling it up in the updates on steam. They simply shrunk it because of the lack of user base. All while wiping the entire game to help with server costs as well.

Supposedly they added new team members a month ago and this was the “We did things guyz” content patch that was supposedly gonna change the game for the better. It is literally the exacty same. No new islands or interesting locales. The same old copy paste still.

No real bug fixes or changes except to shrink upkeeps of things while also nerfing drop amounts. That is their grand hope at changing the game. Considering what Ark became this is just a huge embarrassment for the team behind atlas.

But what do you expect when Atlas was meant to be a mod for Ark and not a standalone game? They seemed to rush out this crap update to capitalize on the steam summer sale.

Avoid this even a year and half later. It is still the same and even worse now because of all the lies and dare I say, almost scam like behavior from the devs.

Amazons Crucible Fails as predicted. Is New World destined to the same fate?

As I did a write up on Amazon Games Studios first official game Crucible here and touched on many of the issues that were present at launch. Well new news regarding Crucible. It has gone from an officially launched game…back to closed beta with signups on the site.

This is a very rare thing. The only time I can really think of that a game has gone from official release to taken down and back to the drawing board was Final Fantasy XIV. Which was also met with a horrible launch and tons of negative criticism for what they gave us.

This does not bold well for the new game studio. While it is nice they see it is not a good game and want to put the time and money into fixing it.. it leads to what may be the norm for the giant studio.

As New World 6 months before release completely changed from an open world sandbox pvp game to a theme park game without any of the systems a themepark has and expected it to be ready for release..Well I have a feeling New World will launch and be pulled back to alpha. Simply because they have not had time to add any of the systems from a complete game change.

I feel this is similar to Crucible. As if you played it..the game itself felt like they had made it a battle royal game then upon seeing the success of Valorant, changed it to try and capitalize on that success. However they left all the battle royal stuff in and did not add any of the systems that makes games like valorant how they are.

This indeed seems like amazon games MO at this point and I cannot help but wonder how they can keep doing this? It just boggles my mind.

Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Command Review

This is a game made based on the games workshop tabletop game aeronautica imperialis. It was fully released today on steam as of this writing. In it you are commanding a small squad of airplane like ships and fighting agaisnt orks or humans in the grand scheme of things. It currently costs 22.29 with the discount from 24.99. It is not even worth 5 dollars.

I did all there was to do in the game in an hour and a half. Most of it was not enjoyable. Now I am a fan of the tabletop version so was looking forward to this but am truly saddened by this “release”.

The game has around 6 to 8 tutorial missions to teach you the game. 6-8 scenario missions which you can do with other players on your steam friendslist.

The last thing it offers is a campaign that can be complete in 25 minutes to an hour depending on the length you choose of the campaign which just consists of you doing randomly generated missions that grant points to hit a point total to win.

That is it. That is the game. There is no multiplayer, no painting or customizing ships or fleets or even pilots really.

The game has it where you choose all your ships moves, then it does a camera mode of them all doing their moves. This camera mode is really really bad. You can barely see what is going on or what happened. It is easier to skip it and see the results.

Ships can fly thru other ships without anything happening what so ever.

It feels more like they pushed out a side mode of an actual game to try and make cash of the skulls event rather than anything else.

Sorry fans, it seems the bad GW games curse is back if the game isn’t made by the total war team.

Here is my full stream video to see for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfcDhzY99MM

Pixark Steam Sale/Free Weekend

Pixark on steam is currently 60 percent off the 39.99 price tag making it 15.99. It also has a free weekend period till June 1st if you are interested in checking it out or trying it. Plenty of official and unofficial servers as well as newly launched official servers for this.

Also my unofficial server is Dingos PvP x3 if you want to join