I tried out the alpha of this game.
The big question I had going into Fractured is whether or not the developers could make good on their promise that a knowledge system gets rid of the grind. It doesn’t. Not for a moment. And that’s not a problem, because MMOs are built on grind. It’s part of what keeps players engaged with the game over long periods of time rather than seeing everything one day and moving on to the next game.
Fractured for those not in the knowhow is an upcoming sandbox MMO. The alpha took place from February 4 through early in the morning on the 6. It’s a heavy crafting-based game with focus on player interaction as well as keeping the economy flowing. Giving people incentives to specialize in doing one thing rather than trying to be the jack of all trades. At least that’s my assumption. If you tried to do everything it would take a hell of a long time.
Being the alpha, everyone seems to be in a very helpful mood. I set down the blueprints for my house and went off to gather supplies, and by the time I got back half the foundation for the building had already been put up by other players. The goal is to allow self-sufficiency without being part of a town, but offer advantages to being in a town. Presumably one can also travel through a town and use their public crafting facilities.
One concept I did enjoy was building and hauling around a handcart. Most items can fit into your inventory to carry around. Big crap like logs and stone blocks and metal ore need to be carried in a cart or you can walk one of them at a snail’s pace. You can also tame a horse and build a pull cart to take resources from place to place. Finding resources at launch is going to be a bitch when the land rush starts, as most tree/rock nodes seem to have a 6+ hour cooldown to refresh. The positive side is that since your individual player can only haul so much of a resource, it intentionally makes it impossible for one player to wipe out a whole area of ore/wood.
Probably.
The book of knowledge gives me small memories of Warhammer Online’s tome of knowledge. For stat hounds it’s a great way to see the kind of information you’d eventually be able to look up on a wiki anyway. I kinda hope that the developers do more with this, like perhaps tracking drop rates as you kill enemies and add to their book of knowledge.
I really didn’t play much over the weekend because I rarely play MMOs where there’s going to be a wipe happening, or in alpha. It utterly breaks my interest in grinding out knowing it’ll be gone in a few days, and frankly I have so many better things to do with my time. Like grind live MMOs and poison myself with fast food.
I will say I’m looking forward to Fractured, although in the sense that when the game finally comes out I’ll play it, and not in the sense that I’m overly excited to dive back in. It’ll be a while before this game comes out.
MMO Fallout 