Pros: Interesting theme, branching quests concept, territory based PVP
Cons: Terrible combat mechanics, bad NPC voice overs
Score: TBD
We got the chance to test The Skies recently, a new MMORPG from publisher and developer Eforb that has gone into early alpha access. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where after 150 years of darkness due to some rather devastating solar activity, mankind is now recovering, the dust is settling, and now the world that we remember is all but gone and instead what if left is a huge desert; the Wastelands. Starting out our journey at our family farm the game is a very story focused RPG and the Mad Max style theme is something that really appeals to us, we’ve been assured there’s no aliens or robots in this game, it is trying to be gritty and brutal and focuses on each players survival in a world of mutated beasts and roaming bands of bandits. Though it is far from a unique setting, and in more than a few ways seems like they’ve tried to take their inspiration from the Fallout franchise, the world itself doesn’t look half bad (albeit graphically at times it can look a bit dated), is designed pretty well and does have that surviving on the edge of civilization feel to it.
Character creation is still a massive work in progress, for an RPG there were very few ways that you could make your character look unique, an absence of various hairstyles and a female character option have been overshadowed by an unnecessarily large choice of tattoos that you can plaster all over your body. Skill/character points has been handled in a more RPG style where you can put points into the 6 core attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Endurance, Luck and Technology) which gives you a rudimentary knowledge/proficiency in each attributes three primary specializations, such as Strength having “Heavy Weapons”, “Cold Weapons” and “Fistfight”. We could put extra points into these specializations to hone our characters playstyle to what we’d like to focus on.
Initially we overlooked Intelligence, focusing more on our survivability skills, the result being that our character dialogue was extremely dumbed down and simple with lots of “Errrm…. uh-huh” as our available response to NPC chat. Pumping some stats into Intelligence suddenly made us an articulate scholar dropping prose and correctly structured sentences and giving us a lot more dialogue options in general, which we thought was a nice touch (and very Fallout-esq).
The farm tutorial area completed we got to head off to the big city, Kimary, in search of our brother. This location is pretty much the main quest hub and crafting/vendor location for the game, with all the territory surrounding just a little outside the city walls being PVP territory. On the main map we could see different settlements, and from the website we knew that players could create Clans and try to battle over these towns, control them, and make money from them; which sounded pretty cool. Trying to check out these locations was pretty much impossible, not because of the players (we actually never saw any in the PVP zone) but the randomly appearing creatures that would always kill us prevented much in the way of exploration that far out.
We had to settle for exploring Kimary and taking on quests, possibly the strongest element of the game as far as we’re concerned. The quests always gave us multiple options in terms of dialogue, able to get more information from a quest giver or other possible avenues to giving them what they wanted, something that is a key feature to the quest system, the skills that you have, the way you have handled previous quests, the reputation you have made, all change how these dynamic quests shape up.
One of the first instances of the dynamic quests was when one of the gate guards asked us to get him some drugs (and not tell the Sheriff about it), giving us two sources to explore: the barman or the town doctor. Heading to the doc he said he’d help us if we completed a task for him and to recover some of his surgical tools from some kid who’d stole them, which lead us to find the kid, which lead us to then go find his mother, which lead us to go deal with a guy who wanted to buy out the mothers house, which finalised in him telling us he’d not buy the house if the mother took work at the brothel. We relayed this information back to the mother and she wasn’t happy, she wouldn’t help us with her son and so we failed her quest, failed the docs quest (and couldn’t get the XP and currency rewards) and shut down one of the avenues to success to get the guards drugs. Passing the Sheriffs building we decided we’d just do the right thing and snitch on the guy, hoping we’d possibly get a quest reward from the Sheriff himself, or earn some reputation with the city, or something along those lines. We didn’t, we told the Sheriff and simply got a failed mission and once more lost out on the quest rewards as well as pretty much wasting 20 minutes as we ran all over the place.
Whilst the concept of the questing system is good, we do feel like there should always be some reward one way or another no matter what choice you take, otherwise it does feel like you are wasting your time and being forced to do things in a certain way just for the initial rewards. Aside from that we will say that some of the dialogue really didn’t make sense, and the voice over acting was awful.
Another quest we picked up had us out just beyond the wall to kill some bandits and we got the first real taste of combat. It is horrific. The seemingly lack of hitboxes means that accurately aiming is generally quite pointless (not to mention that it seems you can miss even when your targeting reticule is over the enemy), aiming at an enemies head or legs would still result in a bloody bullet impact on their chest which is a real immersion breaker and just makes the combat feel clunky. Getting into a fist fight is also awkwardly laughable and the moment anyone with a ranged weapon would appear then it was almost instantly lights out for us, why anyone would go for melee fighting we have no idea.
Whilst the game is in alpha, and so rightfully deserves a little bit of grace when it comes to bad textures, clunky mechanics and poor voice overs, we’re not sure whether the game is just going to be one of those that had some good ideas but were generally poorly executed. The sandbox MMORPG genre is a tough one to break, rarely do we see anything with great success and generally they just have a core playerbase that keeps the game afloat such as APB Reloaded and Fallen Earth… a game that has an extremely similar theme to The Skies and is already a fully released game. The game has potential, but it has an extremely long way to go before the dodgy mechanics of alpha will make it something with any lasting power.
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