Last week Fractured Online was re-released on steam in a new Early Access phase. I’ve been a supporter of this game since its alpha stages and I’ve been playing a lot this past week. I create a post here on my thoughts on the game.

Fractured Online is a MMORPG that was developed with heavy inspiration from Ultima Online, Lineage, and a bit of Albion. It can be very much described as a top down MMORPG designed in a “classical” way. It is this classical design that is often either the best selling point for players or their most disliked.

That being said, the game has seen a stellar response from those who are playing. Going from 40% positive reviews during the previous steam release/test to 80% mostly positive reviews in the past week. It really shows the improvements they made over the past months have paid off.

Here is an imgur link to some images from in the game showing the various things discussed in this post (can’t embedded images). If you’re interested in seeing visuals of some of the systems

https://imgur.com/a/rKK4YFu

Classic Features and Designs

  • Guidance - This game has a tutorial (and please do not skip this, I always lose part of my soul when someone complains about not knowing how to do something because they skipped the tutorial). After that tutorial, you make your own way. This game doesn’t have a “Do quests in this town, then move onto this town, and then go to this zone, and that’s how you level!”. You spawn in the NPC town and from there you choose your own adventure. There are combat hotspots (Red, Yellow, Green) that indicate overall difficulty. But there are mobs all over the map that range from easy to hard and there isn’t some NPC or quest log telling you the exact locations to go in order to progress like say WoW does.

  • Travel - There is limited fast travel in this game. There are harbors around the edges of the island where you can fast travel to other harbors on the island. However it costs based on your cargo and your destination. As a result there’s a fair amount of travel on a horse involved.

  • Monster Grind - A core gameplay loop of this game is killing a monster repeatedly. The way exp and levels work in this game is you gain levels through gaining knowledge. Knowledge is gained through discovering hotspots (? marks on your map), discovering a resource for the first time, and by killing monsters. Each monster you kill has a maximum about of knowledge you can learn from it. Which is shown by a % next to their name in the bestiary. Some creatures will also have abilities they use. And you can then learn these abilities by raising those knowledge presents to certain %s. For example if they have 5 abilities you can learn from them, you will learn one every 20%. Once you max out that %, you will stop earning knowledge from it. Which means you will stop getting exp from it and have to move onto a new creature to grind. They will still drop resources, materials, and sometimes gold. You just don’t get any more exp. Its this “grinding mobs” design that I’ve seen filter a good amount of people. The skill system reminds me heavily of gw1 in some ways. Seeking out specific monsters to try to capture their abilities

  • PvP - This game has two continents right now. One is considered a PvE planet where the only PvP there is, it is “flagged” pvp. You can stay a good alignment and never have to worry about getting ganked on this planet. This is called Terra. The other continent is considered a “Lawful” PvP planet. Where the laws of PvP are broken down into alignments. Good aligned players can only be attacked by evil players, drop inventory on death, and equipment gets durability damaged. They can also sign up as sheriffs. They cannot summon world bosses on the lawful pvp planet. Neutral players can only attack/be attacked by other neutrals or evil players. They drop inventory, but not equipment. Only suffer durability like Good. They CAN summon world bosses. Evil players can attack anyone they want. However they will not only drop inventory, but also equipped items that is determined by how much negative karma they have. If they are killed by a blue sheriff, they can also be arrested and thrown into jail in the game. The maximum amount of jail time you can get (max negative karma) is 2 days IRL. You can also pay bail determined by your negative karma (Max is 10,000 gold) that is split between the city you were jailed in + the sheriff who captured you. Red can not summon world bosses. The goal of the lawful planet is to be more focused on city sieges and neutral vs neutral. Not giant bandit mobs. This system can sometimes draw complaints from both sides of the table. There are people, like myself, who really enjoy it. Most of the playerbase does. But you do still see occasionally complaints. On one side, you have players who hate being ganked in the lawful pvp planet while farming and losing their inventory/time. The other side is you have evil/red players who want a more “rust-like” experience where they can kill whomever they want, whenever they want, and steal all the items without the risk of jail. But overall I think the system is in a really strong spot currently for what its meant to do.

  • Time - the game takes time to play. To buy a plot of land to build a house on, you need 2,000 gold for the initial purchase then another 2k for up keep. With a “meh” build as a solo player, that will take you about 1-2 hours of play time a week. It isn’t that much, but I have seen people complain about it. Traveling takes time. Grinding materials will take time. Refining materials takes time. I saw a lot of players who basically expected things to be quick. That in one play session they could almost complete the game.

  • Group Play - If you want to play a solo player in this game, you will eventually hit a wall. Even early on it can be difficult and is heavily determined by level, personal skill level, and builds. You can’t just build your character randomly and expect an easy solo experience. The initial early on mobs can be easy to solo. But even still there may be some mobs that hard counter you or require certain consumables/abilities to more easily solo farm. As a result, the game heavily incentivizes you to group up. With a group of 5 players (more if you’d like), you can “max out” your progression within 15-20 hours. Being in a group drastically speeds things up and makes things easier. other things like grinding for materials and pvp also become easier in a group. Its this overall focus on group player that often doesn’t vibe with some players. Especially the more “modern” crowd. I’ll often see someone run into a mob of 3-4 enemies and try to solo them. Get killed fairly quickly, then complain. You have to build your character a certain way and learn how to pull enemies so you don’t get overwhelmed. I’m a solo player mainly in this game. There’s about ~145 different types of enemies in this game and so far I’ve been able to solo about 70 of them so far (I haven’t attempted on all of them and am not max level). So you’ll be able to do a lot solo if you want. But you have to build your character with that in mind.

Community

All that out of the way, it is often these classical designs that lead to more memorable community experiences. You WILL establish a reputation if you partake in the community. Both in chat and in game stuff. I really want this game to succeed, so I spend a lot of time helping players. And I will sometimes see someone in the open world whom I’ve never spoken to before recognize me. Saying “Hey PalwaJoko! I always see you in chat helping people, thanks for doing that.”. I have rarely experience such community experiences in the modern mmorpgs and its great to see.

One of my favorite things is how travel works between the PvP and PvE planets. You have to go to a special portal/gate on your map and its opened with a material mainly gathered on the Terra(PvE side). So people will often announce that they’re opeining the portal. You’ll see all these players rush to go through the portal once it does on both side. I think the highest count I’ve seen at once is about 40 players total on both sides. Once the portal is open it only stays open for a minute. But having these sorta mini “portal parties” is also fun. Reminds me of when the dark portal opened in WoW.

It is also a lot of fun just having these goals for large amounts of people. Getting with 5-20 people from your gaming community or guilds and all working together to build a city. To secure it. To defend it. Build homes, recruit citizens. Capture bandits in your territory.

Progression

The skill/progression system in the game is also pretty free form. The main limiting factor are attributes and they determine the effectiveness of certain skills. You then choose skills and equipment that synergies with your attribute setup. This is often where balance issues may come in because of the free form system, people sometimes find “cheese” setups. And the developers are pretty quick in nerfing these when they do appear. But balance is a constant work in progress.

Economy

The economy in the game is completely player run. There is gold that drops from monsters used to buy items on the market place. But it is mainly a player run economy, there are no NPC vendors (at this time, this is something they’re going to explore in the future). So again it does offer some fun interactions with the community.

Each market is unique to each city. So a cities position to surrounding resources/locations may determine its supply to certain resources. Along with this each planet has its own set of unique resources.

Crafting

The crafting in this game is also another major factor. Typically it involves buying a plot of land and placing down refinement stations and crafting stations realted to what kind of items you want to craft. in some cases the cities nearby may have public crafting stations to use, allowing you to focus more on refinement on your personal plot. You use a combination of monster drops and heavy materials to craft gear. Now gear doesn’t have a huge impact on gameplay. Its not uncommon to see pvpers running around in lower tier gear to minimize losses. But it does help.

There is also a very in depth enchantment/imbuement/socketing system that further adds to your experience. Being able to combine certain resources to create powerful added effects on your gear.

Now there is no repairing in the game and the developers utilize that to keep the economy flowing. So that gear replacement is a thing and players will buy resources/gear repeatedly, to keep other gatherers/crafters busy.

Now the game is an indie MMORPG in Early Access. It isn’t feature complete. It could use polish, bug fixes, balancing, etc. You will encounter some toxic community members (If you’ve played a pvp focused mmorpg before, you know what you will be in for). But there are also a ton of very positive good community members that make the game a joy. For 20-25 USD, the game has more than gave me a good return on my investment for time spent being entertained by it. Right now I’m coming up to 70 hours in the past week.

Their current plan for future releases at the moment is Potions -> City Tech Trees -> Demons (Evil race) -> NPC traders -> End game Events

So the question of “Is it worth it”, will ultimately come down to what you’re looking for a mmorpg. If you the type of person who is into these classic designs. Of time, effort, group focused gameplay, PvP, all open world, build/theory crafting, etc; this game will probably be an absolute blast for you. The game isn’t perfect and has work ahead of itself. But I find its gameplay loop quite engaging/fun for what I’m looking for and I hope the game continues to evolve.