Played the press beta.
I will fully admit that I missed the open beta for Soulbound Online, a game that will be hitting open early access by the time any of you read this. Thankfully the folks at Team Jade or their publisher reached out and asked if I wanted access to the game’s press period before the full rollout. And of course I said yes. And then I spent a few days in game playing it. What a concept.
Soulbound Online instantly gained about 30% of my respect for one simple reason; the game crashed out on me once due to a memory read error on the last wave of a long dungeon run. That’s not what I respect. What got me was upon rebooting the game instantly put me back where I was, paused, with the luxury of waiting for me to hit a button to resume the wave. Now that’s fancy.
Let’s talk about the game. Soulbound Online is an interesting combination of two effective genres; MMOs and Survivors-like titles. On the MMO side you have a shared overworld with quests, skilling, trading, and all that fun stuff. The other side of the coin are instanced dungeons that have wave-based gameplay and play out like a Vampire Survivors. You have waves of enemies that you burn through for experience and modifiers to your abilities, and your goal is to survive until the end when you can extract and head back to town. Or you die and head back to town with some rewards.
Now Soulbound is a $15 game with an in-game shop that sells cosmetics, furniture, and pets. But there are some features that are reminiscent of free to play games. You have a stamina bar that gets used when using skilling nodes in the overworld, and timers for things like planting crops and crafting items/upgrades/stations.
The devs have said they are exploring extra monetization and premium subscription, but say none of them will be pay to win.
Skilling is pretty much what you’d expect; there are nodes in the overworld that tell you exactly what you’re going to get and what level/item you need to harvest it. Fishing is Stardew Valley-esque in the form of a mini-game where you wait for the fish to bite and then keep it within your line’s range. Hacking is a little more involved with you sorting and matching icons.
The dungeons have little variations in their objectives and win/loss conditions, you may have to do things like defend an object/NPC from oncoming enemies. I’m not sure how much I care for these special missions, given they seem to be balanced for groups and I was always by myself. Once the game launches it’ll be much easier to find groups. Soulbound Online does have over 100 thousand wish lists, according to the dev.
On the other side you have your own apartment to build, filling it with crafting stations and probably a bunch of decorative items.
I will absolutely be playing Soulbound: Online during its launch week. There’s a good question on how well the game will stand up in the long term, but as someone who has personally stuffed hundreds of hours into Vampire Survivors games and know others who have done the same, I’m looking forward to spending a lot of my time I don’t have in this game.
MMO Fallout 