Reign of Guilds - First And Last Impressions

I was hoping I'd be able to get a quick, short post done today so I could get on with Christmas stuff and also fit in a session of Once Human, so thank you kindly, Reign of Guilds, for making that happen! I really don't have a lot to say about this one so it shouldn't take long.

As I said yesterday, I couldn't remember hearing about this one, which surprised me. At a glance, it appeared to be the sort of thing I'd have been keeping tabs on. It's also in a very late stage of development, with a proposed launch window on Steam of Q1 2024, and there have been multiple tests throughout the year, including an earlier open one in September.

Having now played the game, briefly, I think I've figured it out. Reign of Guilds is a FFA PvP sandbox, not a "classic MMORPG" at all. That's probably why I never paid any attention to it before.

It's another in a long and so far not very successful line games in this sub-genre. As usual, it has some kind of "karma" system that's supposed to regulate predatory behavior. Has that ever worked? About the only truly successful entrant to this somewhat overpopulated field in the last few years has been Albion Online, which succeeded by developing a well-balanced playing field with graded  zones that allow new players to get started and find their feet in reasonable safety, before they move towards greater danger at a pace they can control.

Reign of Guilds doesn't do that. The only safe place for new players is the Inn, where the Tutorial takes place. From the moment you step through the door into the starter village, on the starter island, you're subject to involuntary PvP.

Potentially. There is that karma system, which supposedly makes it unwise for anyone to attack innocents in sight of the authorities. It means you ought at least to be able to walk around the actual village in relative peace. I did, but then I was on the North American server at what would have been about three in the morning on the West Coast, so it may not have been a fair test.

Things didn't go so well for me when I ventured out into the forest but we'll come to that in a bit. First I ought to go through Character Creation. Can't get ganked until you have a character!

The setting for Reign of Guilds seems to be a relatively low-magic, very low-technology, quasi-medieval world. The only playable race is human, which comes in the traditional two genders, male and female, something that already seems quaint and old-fashioned. 

At first there didn't seem to be a lot of options for making a character. The game uses a skill system with no hard classes so there's no choosing to be a Warrior or a Mage. You don't even get to set any characteristics or preferences or dump points into stats. All of that happens in gameplay.

What you do get to pick is what you look like, which again seems to offer limited choice at first. Most of that was fairly standard, although one interesting wrinkle I hadn't seen before was the way height affects both the size of your character's hit box and the reach of their attack. I thought that was quite clever. 

Height also affects how quickly you get full from eating food, which may be going a little overboard in terms of "realism". I'm not sure short people eat less than tall people, especially in fantasy worlds. I guess they don't have Hobbits here.

Other than that, the initial elements of Character Creation seem a little perfunctory - until you get to the face. There, you have as many sliders as you could want and quite a few of them are interesting. I found the option to fine-tune my character's expressions appealing and effective. I can't remember being able to quirk one side of an avatar's mouth up, very slightly, into a smirk before, or certainly not this convincingly. 

Overall, I was quite impressed with the character creation options, other than having to be a boring old human. I wonder, though, what the point of all that fine detail is, when you never really see your character in the actual game. It's strange how PvP games that don't show the player character in action still obsess over what they look like close-up.

All action takes place entirely in first-person perspective. You can toggle to third-person for screenshots, something I didn't discover until afterwards, but you can't fight or really do anything much else. Still, I'm not going to knock anything that lets you take quality selfies, so a cautious thumbs up for character creation, I guess.

I'd also give a tentative high five to the graphics. If they were going for a disheveled, neglected, backwater peasant vibe, they pretty much nailed it. Everything looks clunky and worn-out and dirty, including the peasants. Outside the village, though, the countryside is oddly attractive in something like the sketchy, impressionistic way Valheim manages. Mostly it's skyboxes and mist doing the heavy lifting but it did feel quite atmospheric at times.

Before you get to see the village, you have the option to take a Tutorial inside the inn, which is where you arrive on first login. It's very straightforward but also very long-winded. I'm not sure it really needs both an in-character voice-over and so many very detailed out-of-character walls of text. I found it difficult to listen to one while reading the other but to have done the two things separately would have taken even longer and it already felt like it was going on forever.

Basic melee combat mechanics are relatively simple - LMB/RMB for normal and charged attacks etc. Nothing much new to learn there. There's blocking and dodging, both of which felt awkward, but then I'm not good at that kind of thing. I was, at least, able to complete all of the required moves, easily, to the satisfaction of the trainer, which is a lot more than I can say for some tutorials I've suffered through.

Magic is more unusual, consisting mainly powders, which you throw in people's faces. They can be heated to make them more effective but over-heating makes them explode in your hand. The heating process itself takes place in combat and happens by way of a mini-game, which feels very strange. Even so, I found it surprisingly easy to get the hang of. I'd guess it would feel quite natural, quite quickly, with practice and it's certainly original.

The tutorial goes through all the usual topics - combat, magic, inventory management, skills and so on. The one thing all of it seemed to have in common was fiddliness. Honestly, that's what put me off more than the possibility of being ganked. 

I really don't have time any more for game mechanics that seek to replicate physical processes with anything more than a nod to reality. It seems to me all that does is bring the things I'd like not to have to think about in real life into the foreground in what's supposed to be an escape from all of that. The big advantage computers have over humans is that they can do certain tedious things very much faster, so why not let them get on with it?

With that personal proviso, I'd have to say the mechanics don't look bad per se. I don't like them but they're understandable and they work. If you're into that kind of fiddle-faddle, you'll probably see it as a positive. I might have, once, but I'm older and wiser now.

When the Tutorial ends, it's out the door into the village, where one of the first things you notice is a lot of sobbing and crying. I tracked the source to a near-naked figure in a cage hanging from a gibbet on the main mud track between the huts. I assumed it was some unpleasant local color but then I saw there were lots of similar cages, all stuffed with people, whining and wailing.  On closer examination they proved to be player characters. 

I assume this is what happens if you let that aforementioned karma fall too low. I guess it would make you think twice, although clearly it hadn't stopped all these guys from doing whatever it was they did. As I said earlier, when did it ever?

It makes for a deeply unpleasant introduction to the gameworld. It turns the village into the kind of place anyone in their right mind would get away from at the earliest opportunity, which is exactly what I did. I grabbed a bunch of quests and left. 

Questgivers were easy to find even if they weren't immediately obvious. The default settings put no markers or names over NPCs to let you know who they are or whether they have quests but I often switch all of that off anyway, so it was no biggie to approach a few and talk to them to find out if they had work for me.

Of course they did. They might be peasants and yeoman but they all have plenty of spare change to dole out to strangers for doing trivial tasks they're too lazy to do for themselves. Letters to deliver, goods to collect, animals of all kinds to kill and skin for bounty. I very much dispute the idea that Reign of Guilds is a "classic mmorpg" in most ways I would recognise but they certainly have the classic questing gameplay loop nailed down.

I set out to kill a boar or a wolf for the guy who seemed to want every living thing on the island wiped out but I couldn't find anything bigger than a chicken. I shot at a hen with my crossbow but it ran away with the bolt visibly sticking out of its back and got clean away. They breed them tough around these parts, it seems.

I wandered down to the docks and took a few screenshots, then I crossed a field and went into the woods. I still hadn't seen an animal other than that chicken. As I was searching, I sensed a movement behind me and a purple light flashed past my shoulder. I turned to see what it was. Another player.

It occured to me they might be attacking me but I didn't really believe it. I was in the starting zone. I don't think I've been ganked in a starting zone since Rallos Zek in 1999. So I ignored them, whoever they were, and carried on searching for prey.

The next purple bolt caught me in the back. That cleared things up! I thought for a moment about running away but then I realised it wasn't as though I cared whether my character survived. Might as well see how low-level PvP feels in play. 

Also, I realise now, I've actually done quite a lot of PvP of various kinds over the years. I think of myself as someone who doesn't enjoy PvP but quite often I do get quite a lot of pleasure out of it. I'm just terrible at it, that's all. Also I really don't like losing my stuff but since in this case I didn't have any stuff to lose - bring it on!

The fight went on for a while, always a good sign. I'm guessing my attacker wasn't much more experienced than I was. He certainly couldn't aim any better. He kept flinging fire at me and mostly missing; I got out my crossbow and shot at him, with much the same success. 

We carried on like that for a while. I managed to heal myself with a powder at one point, which I felt was something of an achievement, given the number of operations involved. It was all going quite well until, very suddenly, the screen went black and I was dead.

On respawning at the graveyard, I did what I usually do in such situations and checked the chat box to see what had killed me. It wasn't the guy I was fighting at all. It was a bloody wolf!

I never even saw the damn creature. I'd been out there looking for it, I got into a fight with someone else and the wolf saw its opportunity and took it. The irony was delicious.

It seemed so neat, in fact, that I couldn't see much point carrying on. The whole experience was obviously only going to go downhill from there. 

Anyway, I'd seen enough to know that Reign of Guilds is not the game I'm looking for. The graphics are okay but nothing special. I don't like the setting, I don't like the mechanics, I don't like the tone and I don't like FFA PvP.

From what I saw, though, I don't think it's a bad game. Everything seemed to work. It didn't feel buggy. The writing is competent, if not very engaging. The voice acting is alright. The magic system felt like it might be the most interesting part, there seems to be a lot of character progression with choices based off the skill system and of course there's seige play and organised, mass PvP to look forward to for an endgame.

I'll be interested to see how well Reign of Guilds does when it launches next year. There are always people saying they want this sort of thing. and this looks, on the surface at least, like one of the more competent attempts to service that demographic. It'll be instructive to see if those players show up and, if they do, how long they'll stay.

I'll watch that with interest but from the sidelines. I'm going to unistall RoG now. It was interesting for a moment but I think I'm done.