This month for MMO Co-Opportunities, we’ll be previewing Guardians of Ember, an MMO from Runewaker now in beta. Since the game isn’t released yet (and the content in the beta is very limited), we’ll be looking at the potential MMO co-opportunities I’ve found in my time with the game.
Guardians of Ember (henceforth GoE) shares a whole lot of similarities with games like Diablo III and Path of Exile. In fact, at first I thought it was, in fact, an ARPG rather than an MMORPG, but certain aspects of the game make me re-evaluate it as a hybrid between the two (more on this later). I had the opportunity to play in the first two technical test weekends where there was an enforced level cap and much of the world was closed off from exploration. Thus, the reason for this being only a preview.
Character creation is a straightforward affair of picking your race (dwarf, elf, human, or naia), class (currently ranger, knight, engineer, priest, or arcanist), and some fairly standard avatar customization. Upon entering the game, players are dropped into a short tutorial area. It immediately becomes clear to a seasoned ARPG player than the combat is pretty much exactly like the Diablo series: click to move, Shift to keep your character in place, Alt to clearly see drops, etc. Players can change their key bindings, but I’ll be referring to the default key settings for this preview.
Quite similarly to Diablo III, character skills are divided into primary attacks (left click), secondary attacks (right click), and set groupings of utility skills for the number keys. Leveling up will unlock more skills as well as award points which can be spent in the skill lines of a skill. If you spend enough points, you’ll unlock a new skill which is sort of a mutation of the base skill. For example, the frost ray skill line offers a further skill that’s a frost ray with a small splash effect around it at the sacrifice of some of the damage of the original ray. A primary attack shot that the Engineer gets has an unlock skill that shoots healing bullets instead of damage bullets. All unlocked skills can be freely slotted and switched around, so you don’t have to commit to a deeper unlocked skill at all times. In fact, skill points and attribute points can be fully reset until level 15, so players are free to mess around with different builds and see what they like. That’s really smart thinking on Runewaker’s part and something I fully endorse in both MMOs and ARPGs.
This skilling system was the first potential MMO co-opportunity that stood out to me. Of the two characters I played during the tests (Engineer and Arcanist), I saw many different options for both damage and support/healing skills. This supports extremely flexible play, either between solo and co-op play or between different party compositions of characters. Because the skills can be swapped around, players don’t have to fully commit to having all their skills be healing or damage; they can cherry pick from their unlocked skills depending on the situation. One interesting aspect of this system is that the skills unlocked down a skill line aren’t necessarily better than the previous one, they just seem to offer different options.Further skill synergy options will likely unlock at level 15 when characters select a second class; however, since I wasn’t able to experience this during the technical test, I can’t comment specifically on this.
This variety of options is also reflected in GoE’s attribute system. There are 4 attributes in the game and they’re quite different from the standard attributes found in most ARPGs or MMOs. In GoE, the attributes are Prestige, Bravery, Blood, and Focus. Instead of attributes simply increasing spell damage or weapon damage, each attribute can potentially help all of the classes. One attribute affects attack speed for all weapons and classes, another contains boosts to about half of elemental damage types as well as healing power and shield strength.
This is an interesting system because it asks the players to think about the skills they like using, not just what their class is or what weapon they use. In fact, all armor and weapon types that I ran into are wearable by all classes, they just offer different bonuses. For example, heavy armor offers more defensive stats, but is weak on healing power and spell damage. Bows have great attack damage, but aren’t so great for spell damage. For players who enjoy playing together and dividing up the gear they find, they don’t have to necessarily worry if they both want to play the same class; if the roles they want to play are different, they could be going for entirely different gear.
Before wrapping this up, I wanted to go back and touch upon some aspects of GoE that seem more attributive of MMOs than ARPGs. The game will offer a full housing system, daily quests, and PvP arenas. While I’ve certainly seen these features in games that are not MMOs, they’re certainly the most common in MMOs, which is why I’m satisfied in calling GoE a hybrid ARPG/MMO. I wasn’t able to mess around with these systems in the technical testing session, however, so again I can’t say anything more about them.
GoE was originally planning an Early Access Launch in October, but has pushed that back to deal with pre-launch polishing. I certainly think this is a good idea, because I’ve run into some bugs that will need to be addressed for a full launch. For example, one bug basically made it impossible to group with other players because the party kept dissolving every 10-30 seconds. I’ve also experienced some frame-rate issues in the game. Runewaker is aware of the bugs, though, and is doing everything to address them, which is very encouraging. I’m looking forward to playing the game more post-launch and possibly dedicating a full MMO Co-Opportunities to it, because the game has promise. As a lover of MMOs and ARPGs, a hybrid sounds excellent, but I’ll need to experience more content and sink more time into GoE before I can see how it fully plays out.