This isn’t a new game, but I haven’t heard much about it. I’ve been playing pretty steadily for a week now and it’s been fun. It’s a little tough to describe - you are a commander with a particular weapon specialty and you lead a small number of troops in battle, mostly sieges of one type or another, alongside other players doing the same. You can choose from about a dozen weapons and have an advancement path and multiple possible skills to choose from. You can have a lot of troops in your barracks but you only bring a few to each fight. They also advance in ranks and have a skill tree. There’s a lot of strategy and tactics possible with teamwork making a big difference - if I make a shield wall with my spears, your archers can shoot from behind it and maybe the enemy cavalry won’t run you over as fast. Basic stuff, but done pretty well, with really nice graphics.
There’s also a world map, with resource collection, guilds, territory wars to control fiefs and their resources, guild alliances, guild betrayals, and high level ranked battles. There’s a grind to advance your character and troops (and I would guess fiefs, but haven’t played enough to do that yet), as with all MMOs, but the gameplay sure is fun so far, so it doesn’t feel like a grind yet. It’s free to play, and they definitly want to monetize the grind, but it’s been easy to play so far without requiring additional purchases. Would be a great game for a small group of former shadowbane players on discord.
When I first installed it a couple of months ago through steam, it triggered some malwarebytes trojan concerns, but the company addressed the issue, which supposedly had to do with peer-to-peer uploads/downloads, and I haven’t had any such issues currently.
Looks nice, but that guy shouting the same words every 10 seconds in the gameplay-video (can’t even hear what he’s saying, ‘move out’ or something?) started to grind my nerves real quick…
Repetitive shouts really get to me too. I’ll never forget Baldur’s Gate’s ‘seldom’ option for that reason. Monster Hunt Rise has the option to change the frequency of them too which was a nice surprise.
Yeah, the units shout when you give them orders, which he does pretty constantly. I hadn’t noticed it while actually playing, but I also give orders much less frequently than he does. ‘c’ tells your troops to follow you until you tell them otherwise, so that’s only one shout, while ‘x’ places them into a position and gets a shout - seems he presses ‘x’ while walking instead of having them follow him with ‘c’, leading to a lot of unnecessary shouting.
I am reading that this game is brutal for new players since higher ranked people gang up on you with much better units etc. If true, that is a big turn off.
The 15v15 siege battles are chosen by player rank, so it’s unlikely that you’d have a player who is very much more advanced in those. Open world is a different matter, as you can be attacked by anyone once you are out of starter areas, but you don’t have to go to open world to have fun with sieges and expeditions and advance your character and units.
If you do choose to join a house and fight in territory wars or open world resource collection and fief quests, you do run a chance of being attacked by someone of high level. I’ve collected resources in the open world and fought AI bandits, but have not had a player attack me yet. I think if they do and I lose, they could take any resources I had gathered on that trip, but nothing more than that, so it’s not a big loss.
I have not joined a house to fight in the large scale battles yet - I’m just not high enough level with my character or units to feel like it would be helpful, although there are plenty of houses advertising for new players, even players who are just starting out. There are advantages to doing so, like getting a weekly payout of bronze coins for being a member that can help with recruiting new units and repairing damaged ones. You can also contribute to your house prestige and gain ranks and advance their cities by doing fief quests. I’m looking forward to getting to that point, as it seems like a whole different level of political intrigue much the way the old shadowbane servers were, without the game crashing every time there’s an actual fight. If there is any interest in the Qt3 community, we could form our own house, ally with a larger group, and maybe have a fief of our own to work on.
I’m still playing this, which is saying something given that Valheim and Shadowbane are both tugging at my free time. This video does a better job than I probably did in showing what’s good and not good about the game. I like his idea that it is a mix of Warhammer 2 and Mount and Blade - that should seriously appeal to at least a few folks here.
I will note that the author moves his troops every second or two, which I understand can be annoying when they respond to those commands, but during the game it’s not like that unless you choose to spam the unit formation button.
