This weekend I spent 4hrs. in the Fractured Online alpha.
My initial impressions are as follows; bearing in mind this is an early alpha and this weekend was more a stress test than a test of content.
PROS
1: I like the progression in this game. The developers have made repeated statements about the progression being horizontal with very little vertical progression available. This makes sense in a game that will have some PvP. You will never see the notice: “You’ve reached level 4” in Fractured Online. Launch the balloons and start tossing confetti.
2: You are rewarded for exploring, in fact, this is a necessary part of progression as exploration earns you points that you can use to buy talents on the talent tree. Exploration means finding new harvestable items, killing monsters, and so forth.
3: You are rewarded for interacting with monsters. As you fight them you gain knowledge about them and after you’ve learned enough about the monster you gain access to the some of the monster’s skills. for example, I fought small spiders long enough to earn the “Magic Missile” skill – a skill they’ve been using on me to great effect.
4: The game has non-instanced housing. Community, town building, and housing is an important part of this title. There is some grind built into that equation but the process and reward seem to merit the effort.
5: I’ve not run from an entry level monster since Ultima Online. A young wolf ended up chasing me around the map. I died more to the “easy” monsters in this game than I’ve died running group quests solo in LOTRO. The game is difficult and you’ll have to equip yourself based on what you’ll be fighting.
6: You find out how difficult a monster is to fight by either recognizing that it is large and dangerous in appearance or by poking it with a stick and making mental notes about what happens. No bar, no level, no green/blue/yellow/red indicators. Thank heavens – knowledge about a monster beyond reading a color coded chart is required.
7: I like how death is handled. The MOBs will generally knock you down and after 30 seconds you can get back up again but have part of your health bar unavailable until you rest at an inn. This effect will stack until you rest at an inn. You can choose to fight on, with less maximum health, or trot yourself back to town, bank items, and rest up.
8: You don’t find gear on monsters, only components. All gear is player made as there are no vendor NPCs.
9: The map indicated points of interest which gave some direction and motivation for exploration.
CONS
1: There is very little instruction in the game. I would want the tutorials to do a little bit more hand-holding, and in fact, I think a tutorial instance would be in order. It would help save new player questions from dominating the chat.
2: I was disappointed that the mines located on the map (at least the ones I visited) weren’t underground. I was hoping to go someplace that would require a torch. It could be that these exist, and I simply failed to locate them. I do want to see a dungeon at some point.
3: I didn’t do a ton of exploring but I’d like to see more variety on the landscape. In addition to the bandit camps I’d like to see random graveyards, destroyed caravans, abandoned settlements, and ancient ruins. I went to the sea shore and there were no sea specific mobs (please put in wrecked ships).
4: I’m not sure of the use of money outside of building a town, yet from the player chat the money sinks are extensive. I didn’t get far enough into the game to be sure.
5: The landscape can be a little bit frustrating. There are terraces scattered about that serve as barriers that you must work your way around. I dislike being able to see an area I want to explore but to get there I have to run around a terrace to a road, and then back to the spot I was before but just a little lower on the terrace.
6: Combat feels a little bit clunky, and it took 4 hours of playing for me to finally figure out how some of it works. I kept trying to click on a monster to target it and upon missing the monster with my click I’d walk to that location I’d inadvertently selected. The select/cast/kiting rotation in this game is challenging and not very rewarding.
7: A corpse should eventually be reduced to a skeleton and become freely lootable by all players just as in Ultima Online. I don’t know if Fractured Online does that since I always recovered, but it is simply one of the coolest mechanisms in online gaming, period.
CONCLUSION
I don’t like the game but I did buy a lifetime subscription.
Why?
New World leads with a very solid first impression. In fact, with New World the first impression is so good one has a tendency to overlook the clues (both large and small) that they don’t really have a guiding vision and even if they did know where they were heading they wouldn’t know how to get there.
Fractured Online has a long way to go to realize the full vision of what they’re pursuing but all the early indicators seem to radiate the same message: “We’ve got a very clear vision of what we want and we’re capable of materializing it”. In short, the game isn’t yet what I want it (alpha, remember) but there is enough here to convince me that it can happen and that the team knows what they’re doing.
