Yeah Shatterline was quite positive surprise and with a best price, free. While currently there is only one PvE mode, it is always random. Random what objectives you will get, down to what gear you will get :) So far has been fun. Haven't tested any of the PvP modes, but I might try those on at some point.
This summer to fall season we have seen dozens of new games hit the market and few have managed to garner the attention of our community for long. While some serve as temporary distractions a real attention getter is hard to find. Let's go through our list and I'll share with you where we are at with each.
Get Behind the Scenes
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Starkeepers - We've been approached to help with early development stage involvement in this new MMORPG and are currently putting together a list of players who would like to help in the development of a game. Sign up on our adventure page if you would like to help shape the future of a new upcoming MMO. This is not an alpha or beta. This is early stage developmental builds, focus groups, and presentations where we provide feedback and ideas.
The Shiney
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Shatterline - This surprise out of nowhere was launched by a Ukrainian development team based out of Kyiv. It is a free-to-play action FPS that features both PvE and PvP modes and quickly started grabbing attention. Our adventure here is growing rapidly at this point.
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Warlander - This is what I like to refer to as the teenage years of Happy Wars. The team that brought you Happy Wars has created the next evolution of the game putting your 25-player team against up to 3 additional 25-player teams. At the moment the game is full PvP focused but is rather entertaining. It's starting to pick up some interest but I don't see the title becoming a big title in our lineup until it adds some PvE modes.
Still Cooking
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Fractured - This one we took one quick trip into and found that it was severely lacking on most fronts and needed more time to cook before we try to get any serious involvement into it. I would not recommend playing unless you like to see games in development and are ok with very rough concepts of game mechanics.
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Ember's Adrift - This one is still to early to encourage the vast majority of our players to check it out. There is a handful of us helping test the game ATM but it is in no condition to feature quite yet.
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V Rising - This game features some cool concepts and fun gameplay but is rather small on content currently. It is currently in early access and it will be some time before it is a viable game that can hold long-term attention. While we wait for it to grow, we have a massive factory and garden in the NW corner of Dunley on US West #3030. Anyone who wants to come to check it out is welcome to join us and we can provide you with gear so you can take on any challenge you like.
The Fizzle
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Tower of Fantasy - the gameplay is fun, and the storyline is great, but something is missing. We had a strong entry into the game and the biggest problem we had was trying to grow the guild. There was only one way to get people in and that involved spamming the main chat channel with a default message to get people to click on your guild name to review. This made it very difficult to grow as most players flocked to the largest guild on the list. Over the course of the 2 months, we played population dwindled into a handful of us logging in just to stream it and nothing going on outside of stream time.
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Arcadegeddon - launches into action and practically nobody showed interest at all. While it's a super fun game, I just don't think it matched the desires of the community. But we still do have plans to show it off at the Extra Life event as it's one of the best cooperative games of 2022.
The Dumpster Fire
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Noah's Heart - this one was a train wreck. Gameplay was ok but after 3 days of having a guild no matter how hard we tried with 25 of us playing daily, the game said our community was too inactive and purged our guild we poured all our time and money into. This resulted in the community giving this one a hard nope and gave Noah's Heart the crown for the worst guild system ever created that Skyforges has worn for so long.
While this round of new titles didn't exactly meet expectations, it has given us a little more clarity to just what types of things can be major roadblocks in future adventures. We still have a lot to look forward to over the coming months so there should be no shortage of new things to try.
Discussion
Replied On: 09/29/2022 at 11:50 PM PDT
What's good on Shatterline is that a lot of gamers enjoy the play for progression concept, the more you play, the more you advance the weapons you use and the character you use. There are also tasks that provide tokens that you use to get random upgrades as well. The PvE as mentioned only has one mode at the moment, but it's the "contamination" that makes it random. The contamination are random map wide debuffs that happen the longer you take to finish the mission, yet you have to explore to get boosts and weapons from the supply drops. Fractured has a lot of potential for those that enjoyed games like UO and SWG when it comes to skill system, community city building, crafting, etc. But the game while it has the old school vibes, it also has the old school lack of mob density, long respawn times and very little loot concept that worked 20 years ago on 20 years ago MMO population, it doesn't work well in 2020 MMO population when there's 10-15 players in an area, where only 7 mobs spawn and they take 5-10mins to spawn. Also a centric part of the game is structure building, if not going for a city with a guild, then at least your own home, for this you need 40k gold, the mobs drop from 5g to 40g top thats I saw, you make the math. It's not all negatives though. The crafting system is strong, it can definately get better (looking at Gloria Victis), and the gathering is not running around picking something, move on. For ore, stone, wood crafts, you actually have to pickaxe that rock, or chop at the tree and literally carry a piece of ore/stone/wood with both hands, slowing you down, all the way to a processor. So a tree can yield 2-6 logs depending on the size, you have to carry each one all the way back, run to the tree and repeat...and yes other people can grab it too. You can however build carts to help you carry more in a faster time, and there are horses and horse carriages for more carrying. The different worlds for different players, the freedom to explore and grow, the fact that skills are learned from fighting specific enemies adds a nice twist to it, downward of that is the amount of players camping those enemies... Also Fractured is isometric view, which some players don't like. Embers looks good as well, more traditional 1st person or rpg view, also aiming for old school, which makes leveling very, and I mean very, slow, so don't expect WoW levels of getting to 20-30 on the first day, maybe level 3, 5 if you put enough time. They are still tuning crafting and gathering, they just revamped crafting last week, but gathering is still a hot topic as the gatherable items are very few and extremely hard to see for mining and lumberjacking. They have a true day/night system and without a torch or lamp you will barely see a feet ahead of you. There is also no compass besides looking at the stars, no mini map, no quest journal nor map pins, they use slash commands to review the quest text. Warlander I liked the graphics, and it has a similar advance system like Shatterline, the more you use a specific character, the better it gets and more gear for that character. You can have up to 4 in your selection belt (so once you die with one, you can use the others), and they are cutomizable, so you can have 4 melee characters, one shield, one 2h, one support, etc. The 25v25v25 reminds me of the old DAoC RvR 3 way big fights (given in DAoC they could go up to 100+ each faction on the same battle), and the siege mechanics are similar to Conqueror's Blade but a bit faster. This one would be good with as many guildies as possible in one team for organization and coordination. Tower of Fantasy I enjoyed the story, the exploration, gave me a good Zelda BoTW feeling, but the gatcha area at some point it became p2w, as the best weapon came from there. Noah's Heart, I had high hopes, heck I even went the extra mile to play it on my phone in airports while I was traveling for business, but not only the guild issue, but the game was very handheld, it would automatically take you everywhere and the fact that from the very first day they were spamming $100 characther store advertisings, that says a lot about a game.
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