156 people found this review helpful
4 people found this review funny
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 6.0 hrs on record
Posted: 12 Aug, 2018 @ 2:17pm
Updated: 22 Aug, 2018 @ 5:17pm

Early Access Review
This is a long rant of a review.

Tl;dr You get one character and one only once you go to the main continent. You are STUCK with that one character no matter where you spawn or who you spawn near. If you want a new character, you gotta cough up even more money. If you delete it, you have to spend an extra ten dollars to get a new character. Despite what the support staff claim, I've had over a dozen people confirm there is no warning about having to make an extra purchase when you delete the character.

I'd love to tell you about how this game plays. I really would. But I can't.

Why you might ask? Well, I'll tell you why. I haven't played enough, and now, I can't. Not without spending another ten dollars plus the thirty I spent to get the game.

When you create a character, you start on a tutorial island to help you learn the basics. Beyond some quests with NPCs to learn how to craft tools, farm, hunt, smith, etc. there is not much to do. And by not much I mean basically nothing. There is no 'game' on these tutorial islands. It's a tutorial. You're meant to stay here til you're comfortable, and levelled up a bit, then you travel to the main continent of Abella. This is where you can actually play the game. This is where you can set up your home, figure out what kind of life you want to live, and develop your character how you want.

This is also where you can join a guild, because you cannot possibly do everything alone. Your character can't be a blacksmith/farmer/carpenter/soldier all at once. It will take so long to train, and training just one skill already takes an incredible amount of time. It would be better to specialize and cooperate for the combined success of the guild.

This is where my problems arose. I spawned in perhaps the worst part of the map. One giant, unforgiving desert full of hungry wolves. I had no guild lined up at the time, but it wasn't long before I found a guild interested in taking me in. Problem was, they were quite a walk away. Almost an hour of just WALKING to get to my guild. In a desert full of rabid, man-eating wolves. As well, there is this concept called Judgement Hour which is not defined in game. Without google searching, it sounds like something out of The Purge and would make just as much sense. If you do google search however, you find it does not involve guilds not at war. But, like the other main issue of this review, it doesn't tell you that in the game.

So this perfect storm left me stuck in a desert with no way to get to my new friends. I died quite a number of times trying to make an hour long trek just so I could BEGIN the long process of grinding to learn farming and animal taming.

I oh so innocently thought that, hey, maybe I should just make a new character. An entire guild of almost thirty people said this would be a good idea, because there IS a system in place that allows you to spawn directly to your guild's land claim with a special code when you're teleporting to the main game world. Again, I was not in this guild at the time.

So, I delete the character after being given a warning that said ONLY that I would lose the character and could not get it back. Nothing else. This detail is incredibly important.

Upon creation of my new character, I waste no time with the tutorial and go straight to the place to teleport to the new area. I enter my guild's code, go to teleport...

"You cannot teleport without a ticket. Would you like to buy one?"

...What?

And this, dear readers, is where the issue lies. There is no warning for this when you create a character, teleport it to Abella, or delete it. The support staff on the official Discord will tell you other wise, but so far I'm at two people working for the developers saying yes and about fifteen people in my guild who've checked and say no. I've discussed this issue with two support staff members, and both were incredibly condescending and rude, and blatantly ignored any solution I suggested to this problem.

They claim the community voted for this solution to prevent trolling, but in doing so they're basically barring the game from growing at all. If I know anything about MMOs, it's that people often make a few characters when they're new to see what they like best, and if they have no notion of the ticket system, (which they won't, because it's barely mentioned anywhere or, as far as I've been able to tell, not at all before trying to bring over a second character) they'll suddenly find they can't play the game without handing over even more money.

So, no, I do not reccommend this game. You basically have to spend hours looking for a guild to join before you can even play it just to make sure the one chance you have to play isn't wasted. Any game that charges you more than once to play the game is simply not a game worth getting. Period.

Edit: And, as seen below, the developers did "try" to give me assistance. When I finally managed to get in contact with one, they were friendly and tried to find out what my issue was.

Up until I told them the issue. Once I dropped that, they went completely silent without any other word on it...While still being very obviously active on the Discord! So it has become apparent that this choice wasn't made so much by the community, as it was by the devs being greedy to take advantage of people who would not know better while also conveniently glossing over the fact this system exists!

So, no, with the developers making a point to ignore this without helping or looking at other solutions simply to continue their greedy ways, DO NOT buy this game!
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17 Comments
NMEbase 17 May, 2020 @ 7:23pm 
These crooks need to be sued, not paid. How this cash-grab survived this long is beyond me. Take heed of the warnings FFS!
123 13 Sep, 2018 @ 3:19pm 
It was on my wishlist and now it's getting kicked off it. The game itself isn't cheap if you include one of packs and if theywant to charge you $$$ for each character slot, I can't even imagine what next these greedy people will do to get to your wallet. I'm not against some no p2w cash shop, like skins, outfits and other minor goodies, but character slot? Thank you for this review I will pass it to my friends that were interested as well.
<Insert name here> 11 Sep, 2018 @ 7:18am 
I said about this problem a week or 2 after game was avialable on steam, it muses me to think that there greed has actually lead them to loose more money potentially as they have strangled what was a budding community at launch, so not only are they damaging there player base but even from a greed perspective they have implemented a terribly bad business model and have lost more money in the long run. someone in charge of the decisions made needs to be fired or kicked from the dev team
gregorymooreii 8 Sep, 2018 @ 7:45pm 
I bought it in early dev for $40 . . . terrible mistake. Some good ideas, but as you mentioned, it really just seems like a scam.
Woblob 5 Sep, 2018 @ 3:38pm 
Take note, Developers. I was going to buy this game as I am sure many other people will be considering doing this sale period.
Thankfully, I read Dinoman9877 review first. Thank you for the warning, Dinoman9877. Much appreciated!
Codikin 5 Sep, 2018 @ 1:07pm 
Care about the community or lose the community. :steammocking:
Do_Be 4 Sep, 2018 @ 11:05pm 
It's a dirty world
Dinoman 4 Sep, 2018 @ 9:26pm 
I’m glad to see so many have been spared by my review. Alas, I hope that more are able to see it before they go about purchasing the game, if nothing else to know what to expect upon getting it.
JackK 4 Sep, 2018 @ 7:47pm 
Pure greed from the dev's with the character purchase after deletion. I did the exact same thing, not touched the game since and never will. One moment of greed has cost them a large number of players, believe me!

You are dealing with the issue like he is posting a support ticket due to a bug etc. This is no bug... it is a shitty system you decided to implement out of pure greed!
Oelian 4 Sep, 2018 @ 5:27pm 
Look at those generic comments by the DEVs, pathetic.
Thanks for the review and saving my bucks.