Fellowship has a time limited demo until March 3rd 2025. If anything in this article sounds interesting, I highly encourage you to try it out.
I’m not good at, nor do I like MMO’s. They’ve always been too pricey for me, and while I’ve tried both WoW and FF XIV, neither made me want to play it long term. Somewhere, my character sits forgotten, having only gathered eight of the fourteen nut screws needed to advance to the next set of screw gathering.
Of course, then my friends who like such games will tell me that “I haven’t gotten to the raids or dungeons,” and that those are the good parts. I privately wonder in the back of my mind why, if those are the good parts, I have to spend my time gathering blinker fluid and elbow grease for twenty hours before I get to those parts.
Ultimately, I find myself wondering why someone doesn’t just make a game that’s just the “good” parts of the experience.
Well, someone has, and the game is called Fellowship. It has a demo right now, and it’s open until the end of the coming weekend.
I find Fellowship fascinating because I haven’t done classic MMO-style raids before. As such I don’t really have much to compare it to, and don’t really have too much to say on the subject that hasn’t been said before by others. There’s the classic tank/heal/DPS, extra mechanics are added at higher difficulties, and gear is rewarded on completion.
So why do I care about this game if it’s not really my thing?
Fellowship is interesting to me because it’s a chance to experience a set of mechanics that I’ve previously been locked off from. As an obsessive control freak who hates not being in charge, I chose to tank, and as a result, I now have a quiet seething hatred for all DPS players.
Okay, I joke, but I do find it really interesting how quickly I feel into some of the emotional responses I’ve seen folks make fun of for years, like getting upset when someone doesn’t know the boss, or fails a mechanic. Even if, y’know, I failed that mechanic and didn’t know the boss TWENTY MINUTES AGO. It’s fascinating, and I’m learning a lot about myself. Mostly that I’m an asshole when handed even the smallest ounce of authority.
There is some stuff here my friends complained about that didn’t bother me much, the big one being that there’s no character customization. But as an opportunity to experience the best part of MMO’s without 60 hours of mushroom bullshit? Sign me up.
Disclosures: I received an unsolicited playtest key for this Beta via KeyMailer, the key distribution site. The content in this write-up was made in what the game describes as “Alpha 2 v 1.0”.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, as such I present the following.
Now that I’ve got your attention, either via lust, fear, or horror, let’s talk about DreamWorld!
DreamWorld, full name “DreamWorld: The Infinite Sandbox MMO” based on the press content I had to read, is not intrinsically interesting. The general gameplay is just “Cruddy Valheim MMO.” The controls are somewhat clunky. The graphics are tolerable, and there’s very little to actually recommend the gameplay.
The games only real strong point, outside of the one I’m about to talk about, is it’s building system. And even that, while in depth, isn’t particularly easy to use.
Even as I type this with the game in the background, a single doe clips back and forth at 90 degree angles in the distance.
But the first line of the game’s press release is what really caught my eye:
Surely this could only end well.
A Bad Idea, Implemented Poorly
DreamWorld allows players to use text-based generative AI to create 3D models that can be placed in the world, hence the Venus de Milo Pikachu above.
Using generative AI to create 3D Models isn’t new. Services like Meshy have been around for a bit, and models like Shap-E for local use also exist. But DreamWorld is the first game I’ve seen actually use one in “real time,” instead of just using it to generate assets to place into an in-development game.
As an idea in the abstract, it’s somewhat interesting . As a practical implementation, what DreamWorld currently has in its Alpha lacks necessary guardrails to prevent copyright infringement, adult content, or combinations of both!
Pikachu prior to fusion.
Before I get into the problems with bad actors (me) using the system, I first want to note that the system is entirely useless even if no one uses it to try to create pornography.
In DreamWorld, only the player who generates an asset can see the asset.
The result is that even using this in a positive way, like to cleverly generate extra decorations, the end result only appears for the building player, and no one else. For everyone else, it just appears as a sparkling box. So, the system is useless.
Secondly, assets are only cubes.
Every assets is just cube. It can’t be a chair, or a chest, or something clever and useful, it’s just a static cube. No dynamic properties, no color changing, just cubes.
A Lack of Reasonable Guardrails
DreamWorld appears to lack any sort of moderation on its models. While it limits users to 5 prompts per day, this isn’t much of a guardrail.
Here’s a brief list of prompts and results I tried out.
Prompt: Pikachu Result: Copyright Infringement
With this “success” I decided to try for something slightly more risque. While I suspected their were filters for various keywords, I guessed that traditional artwork would not be subject to those filters.
Prompt: Venus De Milo Result: Tasteful Nudity
With this confirmation that content didn’t appear to be filtered or moderated, I decided to move onto something a little more clever.
Prompt: Venus de Milo with the head of Pikachu Result: Less tasteful nudity
Almost certain of my inevitable ban, I decided to show this off to a few friends. This led to suggestion that if there was a filter, it probably wasn’t calibrated for euphemisms in context.
Spoiler: It was not.
I didn’t end up creating anything too interesting with my remaining generations, but I do think this does a pretty good job of demonstrating that the game is absolutely not ready for prime time.
Now, some folks will be saying “What’s the harm?” or “This is only a problem because you made it a problem.” For those people, I would like to point them to the following document on Roblox from Hinderburg research.
I not opposed to adult content in games. I’ve written about a fair number of them on this site, and I’ve even suggested a few that are worth playing.
But adult content in unmoderated online spaces exposed to children is a bad idea. Unmoderated online generative AI is a terrible idea.
Final Thoughts
I don’t much like generative AI. If you want the longer take, read it here. But ignoring my personal feelings, this is still a bad implementation. Assuming there are no bad actors, the system does nothing meaningful. Taking bad actors into consideration, it lacks any meaningful human moderation or reasonable safeguards.
I reached out to the DreamWorld team on Discord and via Email, and they confirmed on both channels that in the future they expect to allow other players to view generated assets.
All I have to say on that is that I hope they have better moderation by then.
The mechanical gameplay of an ARPG, and the…. well, everything else of a F2P MMO.
Author’s Note: It turns out writing a review of an entire fucking MMO is hard. As such, this article is an overview of my feelings on Lost Ark.And while I planned on writing more about the game, after about 360 hours of playtime, I never got around to it, and now it’s almost 2023. So take this writeup as you will: a non-MMO players feelings on the game about 2 weeks post-release.
Lost Ark is a MMO-ARPG that was first released in Korea in 2018, and got published worldwide by Amazon about 2 weeks ago. I’ve had a lot of fun playing it so far, but I don’t like how it handles its in game cash store. Ignoring its grindy mechanics, there’s what amounts maybe 20 hour opening campaign that was quite fun to play through, and if you like ARPGs, but not MMOs, it may be worth downloading just to play through that.
Okay, that covers all the big points I’d like to make about the game, as per the Gametrodon editorial policy of not making you read 15 paragraphs to figure out if you’d like the game. Now it’s time for those 15 paragraphs, starting with a bit of context on the sorts of games I like. It’s relevant, I promise.
I dislike MMOs about the same amount that I do enjoy ARPGs. I have tried WoW multiple times and bounced off. I did the free trial of MMO Final Fantasy, and had pretty much the same results.
For ARPGs, though, Path of Exile is my second most played game EVER after Dota 2, and I’ve been playing Dota 2 for over 11 years at this point. Steam says I have 1600-ish hours in PoE, and all of that time was before I switched over to using the game’s standalone launcher.
Anyway, the point is:
1. Oh god I’m old, and I’m going to die
2. Lost Ark is theoretically a MMO-ARPG. This means it’s a combo of two genres, one of which I love, and the other I… well. Hate is the wrong word. Hate implies some sort of emotion. And I simply don’t care about MMOs.
Anyway, if you’re wondering how I feel about Lost Ark, all you really need to know is that instead of writing this article, I’ve just been playing the game non-stop. I sat down yesterday to write this, told myself I’d log in to get some screenshots, and then played for something like 5 hours.
The only reason I’m not playing right now is that I know that if I so much as boot the game up, the probability of this article being finished today drops to zero.
This is not to say that Lost Ark is perfect. I’ve logged 113 146 hours in it so far, and I have some issues with the game. But I’m also not planning on stopping playing anytime soon. In addition, there are so many systems involved in Lost Ark that I can’t cover them all. So instead I’m going to try to give an overview of the game’s portions, and enough info to let you decide if you think you’d have fun with it.
A lot of other folks I’ve seen playing the game have divided the game into early game and post game sections. I don’t hate this categorization, but I’m going to break the content down a little differently.
There is a solid early game campaign that is fairly linear, and has zero freemium bullshit. It’s not too different than playing through the story portion of Path of Exile, or the Diablo campaign. At the same time, it’s also sort of a tutorial for later content.
Generally speaking, I liked these portions of the game. The story is a solid B, the design of many of the actual areas is impressive, the dungeons are fun spectacles, and it’s just a solid ARPG. I want to make a quick special shout out to one specific feature here though, and that’s questing. See, Lost Ark looked at every other game that has you go out, collect eyeballs, and then return to Fred the Eyeball Eater and went “What if we just made it so that after you finish the quest, the person you turn into was in the direction you needed to go next as part of the main story instead of forcing you to trudge back into town with the eyeball sack” and it makes things flow a lot smoother. There’s almost no back tracking required for quests as part of the story progression.
I also really like how Lost Ark’s skill system works. You start with a large set of your abilities unlocked, and you can respec your combat abilities for free. This makes quickly switching things up feel fairly painless, and not the slog that it can be in something like PoE. I will also say that while playing through this first portion of the game, while I took a few deaths, there was nothing challenging enough to make me want to switch up my build. My main was an artillerist, a rocket launcher-toting DPS class, and it wasn’t until end game and raids that I actually read though what my abilities did.
The other part of Lost Ark though is the “end game” content, and this is where the Freemium and MMO genres rear their (ugly) heads. At certain points in the story, you’ll be blocked from progressing to the next part of story content until you reach a high enough item level. The way this works is incredibly simple: you stick your item into a gear upgrader, feed it magic shards until it’s full, and then spend more resources to try to upgrade it.
You can also just move your upgrade level to another piece of gear via gear transfer, though this does destroy the gear used as an input.
You’ll note that I said “Try,” because in Lost Ark, you only have a chance to upgrade your gear. If it fails, you’ll need to gather materials to try to perform the upgrade again.
Author’s Note: Apparently this a common mechanic in some Korean live service games. At least in Lost Ark, you only lose the materials invested in the failed attempt, instead of apparently destroying or downgrading your item?
So how will you get these materials? Well, by engaging in either the end game content, or exploring the world. Let’s start by talking about end game content. There’s a bunch of it, and it includes the following:
Chaos Dungeons – AKA “murder massive packs of enemies with your friends.”
Guardian Raids – ARPG Monster Hunter where your teammates are new to the idea of “not dying.”
Abyssal Dungeons – MMO-style raids, where you’ll learn that no one knows the raid mechanics, including you.
There are also several other modes, including PVP, Platinum Field, and Cube Dungeons.
While you can run end game content almost as many times as you want, you can only really get rewards from a given number of runs per a day. If you want more gear and equipment, you’ll have to find somewhere else to earn rewards (most likely something in the game’s islands and other content systems). You could also buy gear off the game’s in-game market, or from one of the gold farming sites you’ll see advertised by the bots spamming many of the chat channels day and night. But, most likely you’ll get them from islands.
Prepare to spend a non-zero portion of your time waiting around for Islands to pop, and not even be made about it, because TOOKI TIME.
Islands are one of the biggest portions of Lost Ark’s content. After a given point in the story, you get a boat, and can sail around, stopping on various islands. Islands tend to have their own stories and mechanics which can range from being mostly self-contained, to sending you on sprawling quests across the rest of the entire world, to just being permanent PVP murder holes.
Okay, so now that we’ve talked about everything I like about the game, let’s talk about the monetization.
Lost Ark is not the greediest or unfairest game I’ve ever seen in terms of monetization. With that said, it is 100% a “Pay for Convenience” sort of game. The game has a membership system at $10 a month that provides a variety of conveniences, and makes it so you don’t have to pay a fee to use the game’s intercontinental teleports. In addition to that, the game’s premium currency Crystals can be used to purchase gold somewhat like how WoW’s membership tokens work. Crystals can also be used to accelerate research cooldowns at your base, instantly finish daily quests, and reset the timer on stored warp points called “Bifrosts.” In simplest terms, there is no cash shop selling godly weapons, but you absolutely can spend real money to purchase materials to upgrade your gear.
Overall though, I’ve found Lost Ark fun. There are a variety of systems and collectibles I haven’t really touched on in this article, including the world bosses and timer events, the Stronghold mechanics, and skills and how the passive abilities called engravings work. But the end result is fun game, even if it has some weirdness, like the gender locked classes, and Pay 2 Progress Faster mechanics.
I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about Crowfall for the last few days. Let’s start with my opinion on the game: Crowfall is too fucking expensive to be worth playing. And when I say expensive, I mean both in terms of money and time.
If you want, you can close this article now, because the rest of it is going to be an extensive exercise in dead horse beating. If you’re still here, please grab your stick and join me.
I’d tolerate the mediocre graphics if the gameplay had any redeeming features. It doesn’t.
I want to start by talking about the easiest part of Crowfall to quantify: the simple monetary cost. Crowfall is $40, and it also has a monthly VIP system that costs about $15 a month. This puts it about on par in terms of pure cost with its competitors. Final Fantasy 14 is $60 for the full game with 4 expansions, and a required monthly subscription of about $15. World of Warcraft is $40, and also $15 a month plus the incalculable cost of knowing you’re supporting Activision-Blizzard, making it cost effectively infinite money. New World is $40 and the knowledge that you’re adding Jeff Bezos’s draconic horde of wealth.
This is a problem, because on a scale of “Virtual Disneyland” to “Digital Version of Detroit,” Crowfall is the latter. It wants to be a hardcore PVP game, with fights for territory, resources, and areas going on constantly. It has castles and landmarks that you can build up and guilds to join. As soon as you’re out of the pure tutorial world, when you die you drop 50% of your gold.
In the normal world, when you die, you drop half your inventory.
I have a bunch of small problems with Crowfall, but I have small problems with almost every game, so I’m going to talk about the big problem I have with Crowfall: the game expects you to do everything with other people. And not just a few other people, a lot of other people.
Let me give an example: One of Crowfall’s big ideas is that you are a “Crow,” a semi-immortal soul repeatedly brought back to life by the gods in order to fight for them. In terms of in-game mechanics, this means that to level up past a given point, you need to get and fuse with a new body.
Getting these bodies requires that you start by digging up body parts. In order to do this and get anything that’s not garbage, you’ll need the grave digger discipline. I believe it counts as an exploration discipline (more on that later). However, in addition to that discipline, which is a socketable rune, you’ll actually want an upgraded version of the grave digger, which you get by… farming random rune drops from digging up corpses. This requires you to have an intermediate shovel at a minimum, which means you’ll need to craft yourself a shovel, then upgrade it, which means you’ll need to mine and quarry stone, because those two are different. Once you have your upgraded rune that you got from RNG and upgrading (and you’ll need to socket Runecraft to actually upgrade it, I believe) you can actually start grinding again. Now, when you’ve finished grinding, you’ll have the body parts. You can’t use them yet, of course, you need to remake them. This means combining them with some other body parts, and also Ambrosia, which you’ll need an alchemist to make. Now that you’ve got all your body parts collected, you can finally combine them into a new vessel.
Hooray! Did I mention that doing this requires that you collect the right type of each body part for the right race of character that you want to create?
So why are we doing all of this? Well, because without doing it, you can’t actually play in a Shadows World, which is to say the big boy world. Up until then, you’ll play in what is basically a tutorial world. That’s right, this multi-step process just to create a character is more or less before you can actually start playing the full game.
Remember how I said we’d come back to that bit about minor disciplines? Well, you can only actually have two equipped at once, and you can only change them out in a temple. Long story short, there’s no reasonable way to do all of what I described above as a single person, or even a pair. You’ll need a guild or another group to work with. Without one, you’ll most likely have to stay in the beginner world, where drop rates are lower, and buildings seem to reset daily.
Now, it’s entirely possible you read all of this, and go “Wow, that seems like the game for me!” And maybe it is. Maybe you’re all excited about PvP, farming for random items for hours, and ganking other players.
One tiny problem: remember how I mentioned the devs hiding the player count up above? Well, that might be because the servers are incredibly fucking dead. In my time spent during the trial, I feel like I saw less than 30 players total outside of the spawn area.
Yeah, the game is not highly populated.
I have some other problems as well. The auto-attacks put all of your other abilities on cooldown, making combat super frustrating. The number of enemy types in PVE are really low. There’s no form of inventory sorting, meaning that your inventory more or less ends up looking like Minecraft. Speaking of mining, your auto attack and your harvesting abilities are bound to same key, so if you don’t click on that boulder correctly, you’re now in combat until that cooldown wears off in a few seconds. Oh, and if you try to put items of a type you already have into your bank, but don’t have an empty bank slot, you can’t. Even though you already have those items in your bank.
So yeah. Crowfall is an attempt at a sandbox, heavy player interaction MMO, but because there’s nobody playing it, and it takes forever to do anything. It’s filled with small annoyances, and systems that don’t feel fun (I’m looking at you, obscenely fast gear decay). Some of its ideas are decent, but on those bones sits nothing of interest.
