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

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

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.

Population Zero Review

Yikes. The only word that comes to mind with Population Zero. If you want a game that takes the worst aspects from mmos and survivals and puts them together than this is a game for you. From the start of the game it gives you a crappy custom character creator that is pretty limited. Then it shows you all these cool options but nothing you can do until you level up the “account”.

You create and then click play. Then you are given 3 game modes but can only do the pve mode because all the rest is locked behind your account being higher. You cannot even pvp until you level up more.

Upon logging on you are met with a barren world with few things to interact with, very few people, and even fewer npcs and mobs. You are given a few supplies and a metal pipe. Upon doing the quests and finding the npc city for questing. Yes this is a game that takes the kill 5, gather 10 quests everyone mmo fan loves and decides you need 10, or 100 of them.

The survival aspect is in the hunger, water, elements and toxic elements. All of which are pretty extreme and silly.

Crafting? Well you can unlock tons of crafting recipes, like stone, bone(a bonesword that is very similar to last oasis), leather and other basic crafting. You know, the type you expect in a nonscifi mmo. But no ranged that I have seen. This is a scifi mmo that apparently everyone forgot how to even cook meat on a campfire or how to even make a campfire let alone anything more advanced than level 20 ark player.

Also there are no stones to be found. Took almost 2 hours to find 3 stones. Now you could say it is because the game is so populated, but, at of writing this there was only around 736 in game. So to advance past your crappy metal pipe you start with, you need stones for stone weapons and tools to even gather most stuff. Which you cannot get. As stones do not exist.

The way to advance is thru quests and finding new objects which help give you points in various sections. However the land is either weather extreme so you cannot explore, or so barren of anything to interact with or fight it makes you want to jump off a cliff.

Also there are apparently only 4 mob types and most of them are just the same model but colored different.

The graphics and art style is “okay” and about the best part of it.

This game was not ready for early access and should be avoided. Maybe in 3 years with a new dev team this game might be something. It is also at a mostly negative review on steam as of now.

The Survival Genre Issues

There are quite a few glaring issues with the survival genre. Atleast those online anyways. Many try various gimmicks to try and fix it but normally fail for the most part. So what are the biggest issues in the genre?

Offline raiding. This tends to be a major issue for most survival games. The issue of this is that if you are not on the game 24/7 there is a high chance people will wait till you log off to raid you. Now there is a few trials to fix this in the genre but most tend to not do well. Many offer a pve-conflict type option where there is timed pvp and no base destruction, but that leaves tons of other issues and a lower player base.

Last oasis has the offline protection logging for the player/walkers but the server issues make this impossible to be good or even work many times. Others like rust/cryofall tend to wipe every month but that makes it more session based and less fun for folks who do want a static place. Also unless the core loop is really really good like rusts gunplay then no one is gonna want to keep doing that fresh start loop.

The most logical fix would be to create a way for the base to become immune or protected a few minutes after the player logs. While this can create issues of battle logging but there are ways to make it so one cannot battle log either.

Another issue is that many in the survival genre think pvp is offline raiding. Infact that is the complete opposite of pvp. But the least risk and most reward is offline raiding as bases simply cannot survive without the player online. So this creates a weird non pvp meta in a genre that promotes pvp. Of course this would be solved if offline raiding was not a thing.

The core game loop tends to be a big issue for many of these as well. Many of the survival devs say they just can’t fix the offline raiding problem, however, I think it is mostly because without that loop of always starting over most players would find the core loop is basically nil.

So rather than create a good loop and a lot of good content they rely on crappy mechanics to be lazy.

The last issue is the alpha or huge tribes that are able to build up and keep things in games that do not wipe. Of course many of those do get all that by offline raiding and not really grinding it out so of course offline raiding protection would help this. But there can be other ways to help this. Various limitations on numbers, or places owned. Something like a purge like conan does. Or even adding a system where if you get to a certain level then random folks could team up to take you down. Letting the player population basically police itself agaisnt such things.

Of course these are only some of the issues but the most glaring ones that plague the genre. Think you for reading and if you have any comment or ideas feel free to do so!

Last Oasis Now Live!

Last Oasis entered a stress test today. On launch day the games backend servers crashed when they reached 10k concurrent players. Today after a week of working on it we are now sitting at 20k and climbing with no real issues. So far it is looking good and the population is crazy.

On launch day in the starting cradle area I only seen a couple of people and it took me 2 hours to find pvp. Today on relaunch? I have seen 20-30 people in the cradle and it took me 10 minutes to find pvp! Check it out here: Dingos Stream First PVP.

It does seem they did delete and wipe everyones data which was expected. But if you got to play on launch day going back into the tutorial is a breeze. For those that are playing for the first time; do the tutorial. You will thank me greatly later.

It seems the steam survival crowd now has a new and very exciting game to enjoy and sink their stay at home time into! This EA survival game is one of the most polished ones to hit steams ea survival crowd since it started.

See you all in the sands!

PixArk Second Anniversary

Pixark a game that fell hard but is one I still adore turns 2 today after it left early access. This event brings new skins you can get as well as a really cool cape.

Outside of that there is some new bone skins and item skins as well as a new item or two.

While not everything has been fixed that is buggy in the game they have made strides and I feel as it turns 2 pixark and the skyward dlc is in the best place it has ever been.

If you want to hop on feel free to join our own servers: Dingos Pve and Dingos PvP x3

Happy 2 years Pixark!