You get to become a god and fight other gods
There’s something about Skyforge that’s kind of unbelievable. It’s an MMO that’s doing away with the multi-server issues by having millions playing together on one server, visuals are highly detailed putting in on-par with current-gen graphics, and it pulls off this unique fusion between sci-fi and fantasy.
Most impressive of all, there was a point while watching Skyforge being played that I forgot it was an MMO. I seriously thought I was just watching an action-adventure style game instead as the fighting system is more in-line with, well, a fighting game over the monotonous experience you’d normally expect.
Skyforge (PC)
Developer: The Allods Team
Publisher: My.com
Release: TBA
Skyforge’s story sees you rising in power to become a god. Seriously. The end game content actually has you becoming all god-like with godly powers. Oh my god! The former god of the world disappeared without a trace, so there’s a race among the inhabitants to become the ruling god of the realm.
I only got to play about 15 minutes of the game but it was within the first few minutes that immediately drew me in. I played as the paladin at first, and she is this super quick and effective tank type class. She also played like a fighting game character in hyper mode. On top of her spells and special abilities, her main attacks can perform different types of strikes with different combinations of left and right mouse clicks.
There will be up to ten classes at launch, and you’re able to switch between them on the fly. Whatever experience points, customizations, and the like you get will only be applied to the current class you’re playing as. From the paladin I switched over to the Cryomancer class, which primarily relied on ice-type attacks in conjunction with a little flying robotic helper.
Everything is highly detailed, from the character models to the environment itself. I wouldn’t say they’re as clean and crisp that the trailer and screenshots provided to us would lead you to believe, but it was still looking nice in a live setting.
I’m really curious to see how this will all perform when there’s millions of people playing. Some zones can house upwards of hundreds of players, while others will be more limited. It just depends on what part of the world you go visit. There’s also some instances that will be limited to just one person, such as the one I saw that was set in a factory with a linear path funneling you to fight a couple robotic bosses.
A short demo, but enough to show me that there’s a lot of potential here. It will be interesting to see if they can actually pull off. Regardless, the developers were able to get me interested in an MMO, which really never happens. This is also another case where the free-to-play elements could make or break the experience, so hopefully that’s not a totally dumb system.
Published: Mar 25, 2014 09:00 am