It’s a mess of systems that don’t mesh well together.
It’s a 3v3 hero shooter where the objective is to capture a sword, carry it to the enemy base, and use it to initiate a base assault phase where the attacking team tries to sabotage gizmos while the defending team tries to stop them. This basic gameplay is more or less fine; I have some quibbles with time to kill, ability balance, weapon variety, etc. but they’re not the important part. The important part is that there are a bunch of things that don’t support this core idea, such as:
The map is way too big for 6 players, and everyone gets a mount to move around the map faster. Why not make the map a reasonable size and scrap the mount mechanic? Presumably to sell mount cosmetics, and to provide space for all the treasure chests that make up point 2.
Despite being basically an arena shooter, it for some reason has the open-chests-for-random-loot mechanic from games like Fortnite and Apex. In those games, the purpose of tiered loot is to give you an incentive to keep opening chests throughout the early and middle game, which drives teams into the same areas and encourages them to fight for resources instead of turtling. In this game, you’re always in competition with the other team over the objective, so this is totally unnecessary. The game actually starts with like two minutes of enforced looting time to make sure that everyone opens chests to gear up instead of rushing the objective. Why not just put weapon spawns in strategic locations on the map like in Quake, UT, Halo, etc. and cut the entire looting phase?
Speaking of loot, to get currency to buy armor and extra gear, you have to mine ore during the match. Clicking rocks is not the kind of exciting gameplay you really want to see in a fast paced 3v3 shooter. Shopping is probably not a thing that should be in a fast paced 3v3 shooter.
It overall creates a muddled impression of scale: the map is big, the sword summons a giant siege engine, the looting and shopping mechanics feel like they belong in a game with high player counts and long matches. The game feels like it’s designed to evoke a feeling that this is a huge battle. But there are only six players in the map. It ought to feel tight and focused and hectic, and during the base assault phase it does! But they’ve made a bunch of design decisions that work against the the game mode they implemented.
And it’s the only game mode, so if you think that it would be better with bigger teams, or if the objective was different, or you just want to play deathmatch, you can’t do any of that.
I was watching a streamer play it and the mane physics on the mount is cool, but it feels like it moves slightly faster than no weapon sprinting in Apex. Apex also has more fun ways to get around to combine with sprinting and feels less cumbersome than summoning a horse.
Yeah, it just sounds like a mishmash of whatever’s popular to get the funding to get made. Normally things like this would just live on the epic games store as fortslop and you’d never hear about them
It’s a mess of systems that don’t mesh well together.
It’s a 3v3 hero shooter where the objective is to capture a sword, carry it to the enemy base, and use it to initiate a base assault phase where the attacking team tries to sabotage gizmos while the defending team tries to stop them. This basic gameplay is more or less fine; I have some quibbles with time to kill, ability balance, weapon variety, etc. but they’re not the important part. The important part is that there are a bunch of things that don’t support this core idea, such as:
The map is way too big for 6 players, and everyone gets a mount to move around the map faster. Why not make the map a reasonable size and scrap the mount mechanic? Presumably to sell mount cosmetics, and to provide space for all the treasure chests that make up point 2.
Despite being basically an arena shooter, it for some reason has the open-chests-for-random-loot mechanic from games like Fortnite and Apex. In those games, the purpose of tiered loot is to give you an incentive to keep opening chests throughout the early and middle game, which drives teams into the same areas and encourages them to fight for resources instead of turtling. In this game, you’re always in competition with the other team over the objective, so this is totally unnecessary. The game actually starts with like two minutes of enforced looting time to make sure that everyone opens chests to gear up instead of rushing the objective. Why not just put weapon spawns in strategic locations on the map like in Quake, UT, Halo, etc. and cut the entire looting phase?
Speaking of loot, to get currency to buy armor and extra gear, you have to mine ore during the match. Clicking rocks is not the kind of exciting gameplay you really want to see in a fast paced 3v3 shooter. Shopping is probably not a thing that should be in a fast paced 3v3 shooter.
It overall creates a muddled impression of scale: the map is big, the sword summons a giant siege engine, the looting and shopping mechanics feel like they belong in a game with high player counts and long matches. The game feels like it’s designed to evoke a feeling that this is a huge battle. But there are only six players in the map. It ought to feel tight and focused and hectic, and during the base assault phase it does! But they’ve made a bunch of design decisions that work against the the game mode they implemented.
And it’s the only game mode, so if you think that it would be better with bigger teams, or if the objective was different, or you just want to play deathmatch, you can’t do any of that.
I was watching a streamer play it and the mane physics on the mount is cool, but it feels like it moves slightly faster than no weapon sprinting in Apex. Apex also has more fun ways to get around to combine with sprinting and feels less cumbersome than summoning a horse.
Yeah, it just sounds like a mishmash of whatever’s popular to get the funding to get made. Normally things like this would just live on the epic games store as fortslop and you’d never hear about them