After New World's... lukewarm reception, Amazon is trying their hands at yet another MMORPG.
And this time, it looks like they may have gotten things just right, hitting the 1 million player mark in the first day of release and needing to delay the launch of its American (continent) servers for some hours because of the massive influx of players.
I'm going to go more in depth about how this plays and about the systems, because I've not yet gone far into the story yet, but the premise seems interesting enough and the plot has most certainly got more interesting, with a magical stone that can save the world, priests, evil dudes disguised as priests and big booba ladies.
Character creation is nothing too out of the ordinary, it's not even that impressive.
You can most certainly make something that's your own, but your looks are heavily determined by your class (which makes sense) and the options are very locked down with not a whole lot of sliders to play around with.
I was still satisfied with what I managed to make, but I can certainly see people coming from other MMOs such as Blade & Soul, Black Desert and Final Fantasy 14 being a little disappointed.
The game has 5 classes to choose from, with each class having at minimum 2 different subclasses and at most 5.
All of them play very differently and each subclass has a rather different skill tree to follow.
Currently, I'm playing a Sorceress Mage, which for whatever reason is locked to female, but that's normal for MMOs (locking classes to genders).
So how's the gameplay?
Good. Very good.
This is a mouse focused game, in the vein of Diablo, Path of Exile and Torchlight
The combat feels a lot like a mix between all of those, combining old whilst still managing to be fresh and engaging to someone who's been playing games like these since I was wee kid.
The quest structure, towns, economy, world chat, player interaction and such all feels very reminiscent of my old love Runescape, and that's something I can't help but like. Seeing all the players huddled around shops, talking to NPCs, getting into portals to traverse the world and announcing their wares just gives me a sense of nostalgia, and it's great to see this in a modern game, a modern game that's backed by a large company such as Amazon.
I wish I had more to say, I wish I had footage or screenshots, I uhh... borrowed most of these from the internet (shame on me).
But I beg you to play this if oldschool top-down MMOs or games like Diablo, Torchlight or PoE are up your alley. This is an excellent title and can only be brought down if Amazon manages to screw up, which we know is possible, as they screw up a lot of things, like their working conditions for examples.
But let us hope this isn't a runaway success, this could become something great that goes on for years, and I'm certainly going to be sinking my teeth into it harder and harder. As soon as I hit the level cap, I'm taking a look at the other classes.
Great game for a new release.
Don't screw it up Bezos, or whoever runs their gaming division, maybe I'll pay for Prime again.