It feels criminal to ask people to pay a monthly subscription for this garbage fire. I would rather play Runescape Classic at a similar time in development. Normally wouldn't leave a negative review for a game in Early Access like this, but now they are adding FOMO cosmetics to encourage more subscriptions which is disgusting for the state of this game.

There is no actual fun in the game, and the only thing that carried me forward was the hope of fun to come. The problem is the game is fundamentally flawed. The only thing you can do in this game is click and watch number go up. All skills are like that, quests only exist to pretend there is a point to grinding. You can't unlock new content or actually do things to break the monotony.

I would be shocked if this game was good in 5 years let alone anytime soon. Highly advise avoiding this unless you have absolutely no respect for your time and actively want to make yourself more miserable.

So I gave the game a good try, as you can see from the nearly 300 hours I have. However, I have to ultimately say that I cannot recommend this game, and will only be popping into the game when new updates happen to see if things somehow improve, but they really can't.

The thing is, people will often defend against criticisms of early access games by saying it's early access. This is a good defense for nitpicks like "This skill needs better FX" or " We need more things to do in this area". This is not a good defense for criticisms like "Combat is fundamentally bland, and a skill tree isn't going to make it more fun."

Let me explain what I mean, point by point, on how my problems with this game are not easily fixable based on it being in early access. I have more to say about this than what the review character limit will even let me do, so I'll have to be concise.

First off, professions, AKA profs. BS has over a dozen profs in the game and wants to add more with every episode. The thing is, we already see a ton of overlapping between the profs we currently have. Forager and Gatherer are the exact same thing, just by different names - and Delver, a future prof, is the same. It's not just these three, either: the weaponcrafting profs are fundamentally the same thing, whether you're doing it at a furnace or at a workbench. Game's not even out yet and we already have 1/3 of the profs overlapping. If each prof takes around 500 hours to max, why pad it out even more by adding dupes?

Second, the design of these profs. Having 500 levels of a prof, and so much dead space between unlocks, promises there will eventually be content added to fill out these gaps. However, it's pretty evident after looking at how the profs work that 'filling it out' is pretty much impossible.

For example, it seems fairly possible that the upcoming Builder prof could incorporate Carpenter into its loop, like maybe you can fashion various sorts of "lumber" that are used in building things. Woohoo, less dead space in Carpenter!... except, no. If you're gaining Carpenter xp by making Builder materials, then you'll outlevel the wooden products you gotta make for your weaponcrafting skills. In this hypothetical scenario where you level up your Carpenter through the new building skill, you'll still need to spend hours buying the products you would have made for weaponcrafting, so you can train your weaponcrafting. Not very fun, and it shows us that the only real way old profs can interact with new profs is if currently released profs give you an interim product with no use until its other half makes it into the game, like what's happening with Leatherworker right now and its leathers being useless until Armorer comes into the game.

Third, passives. A good idea with poor execution. The first problem with passive training is that many skills are expected to be trained in tandem with one another, so passively training one skill will leave you floundering in the skill it's connected to. For example, say I hate mining Deathstone. I want to passively train to the next tier past Deathstone because I hate mining it so much. That'd be fine, but my Stonemason skill uses nothing but Deathstone for crafting the next 10 levels. If I want to train Stonemason, I either have to buy a ton of Deathstone and run it back and forth between the vendor and the bank, or I have to passively train Stonemason as well. If I wanted to passively train everything, I'd play Melvor Idle.

That's the price that passive training almost always carries with it: You may be able to skip a certain tier for that prof, but the prof it's connected to still needs those materials, so you'll have to spend a lot of time mindlessly running back and forth between vendor and bank if you decide to do a passive.

The second problem with passive training is the poor execution of training passives by using items gathered from other passives. The profs are sometimes so out of sync it's hilarious. Sometimes, it's fine, like Fisher and Chef almost always align on their passive activities so you could hypothetically train them in tandem and suffer no problems. Others are so, SO bad - for example, you need 169 Gatherer to passively obtain the Sheep Ribs that the level 70 Bonewright passive needs. Or how about needing to train Forager passively at both 158 and 170 in order to get the materials needed for the level 140 Alchemist passive? This isn't so bad in practice since you can just buy the passive materials, but the fact it's so badly designed right off the bat isn't promising.

Fourth is itemization. One of the biggest plans with this game is to add trading: My question is, how could that possibly help? There are so many variants of every item in every prof that you would need thousands upon thousands more active players to even have a chance that someone would be selling what you need, but that isn't all: Remember what I said about skills needing to be trained in tandem? If you sell the items you gather instead of using them, you're just screwing yourself out of the materials you need to train another skill. The only fix for this would be if items had more than one source besides the vendor, like from monster drops, but this would in turn require some sort of change to the inventory or banking system because most everyone already ignores the drops monsters give right now, unless it's a good piece of equipment.

Fifth, and the HUGEST problem with the game, is the combat. The combat is so, so, bland. Imagine if auto-attacking was the only thing you could do in WoW, or RS. Can't move, can't cast abilities, can't do anything except swing your mace and drink potions. It doesn't matter if the game is in early access or not, as far as I know the actual combat system is done, it must be since they're already trying to design a raid. The only thing this combat system would let you do as far as skill expression would be moving out of harmful tiles, or maybe having to equip a 1/2 hander for certain mechanics. That's it.

Worse is: What is bossing gonna look like, exactly? Given the game has 2000 combat levels, there's really only three things it can do: First, maybe bossing content is only tuned at max level, which would suck to have to train 2000 levels just to access it. Second, maybe bossing is only meant for certain levels, like maybe you unlock a boss at level 500 and he drops gear good enough until the next boss at 750, in which case no one would ever grind normal enemies again. Third, maybe you can access the content at any time and it's scaled to you specifically. Sure, but then what does that mean in terms of items? Should I just grind this boss out until I get the drop, and then do it again 50 levels from now? Lame.

What's more, is they plan on increasing the combat level by 500 every time they release a new episode. Holy crap. Imagine having to spend roughly 500 hours re-capping your combat level every time a new episode releases. How will this even work with the crafting skills after the next episode, since they only go up to weapon level 2500? They'll either have to expand the level ranges craftable weapons have with every single episode release, or they'll have to add another 100 levels, which means more gathering, more woodcutting, more carpentry, more mining... see how shortsighted these systems truly are?

So, I'm about to hit my 8000 character limit and there's so much more I'd like to say, but I got the most pressing issues detailed at least. Only way I see many of these issues being resolved is a complete redesign from the ground up of... well, basically everything, systems-wise. Problem is, the people who are still playing - the ones who put up with these systems - are the only feedback the devs get now, and they are extremely defensive. TLDR: Stay far, far away from this game.

its alright...personally i just play this and wish it was runescape then log off and play runescape