Previews

What if God was one of us? Skyforge preview

The end goal of all MMORPGs is to be the most powerful, but Skyforge takes that one step further: rather than tell the story of your adventures, Skyforge aims to tell the story of your rise to godhood. While the game in its current state has lofty ambitions, and a unique combat system for almost every class, it’s sadly held back by technical difficulties, as well as some really uninspired level design and a few glitches. While I had fun with my time in Skyforge, it’s hard to recommend to everyone in its current state.

Skyforge starts fairly simply: you’re a low level grunt on a routine mission, ready to fight the baddies when suddenly you’re struck dead in an ambush. However, something awakens within you, and you get back up to finish the fight. Asit turns out, you’re an immortal, a divine being with a ton of potential. While, at the moment of your rebirth, your only notable skill is your inability to die, it turns out that immortality is the first step to full-blown godhood. Achieving that level of status, however, requires you to build up your power, renown, and, eventually, your church.

Few games promise to make you a god, and even fewer deliver on that promise.

While that all sounds fantastic, like the culmination of all epic power fantasy MMOs, in its current state, Skyforge isn’t is as exciting as it sounds. The moment-to-moment grind of Skyforge has a progression system not unlike your standard MMO. You start fighting small creatures and work your way up to big ones, gaining power all the way. While the opening talked a big game, never while playing Skyforge did I ever feel like a god; instead, I just felt like an average joe adventurer, just with my standard video game immortality acknowledged by the game. While there are more god-related events later on, like offerings from your followers and the ability to build up your churches and other religious-based structures in a sort of micro-management system, they mostly take the form of passive buffs and the like. Still, the game is in Beta, so it’ll be interesting to see how that changes.

The class system, however, is a lot more varied than the average MMO. Each of the classes use slightly different styles of combat, and there are a whopping thirteen different classes, though I was locked to three in the beginning:, Paladin, Lightbringer, and Cyromancer. While the three basic classes fill the standard RPG trio of Tank, Healer, and DPS, each one has a different style of combat as well as a different role in combat. Paladin has a combo-based melee style, Lightbringer supports from mid-range, and Cyromancer uses an assortment of long-range attacks to deal damage and movement abilities to get the heck out when enemies start crowding. Each one is fun to play as, at least for a few missions, and you’re free to switch things up with a different class whenever you feel like it. Classes level up and gain new abilities by completing objectives, which means you’re free to multiclass whenever you want to, as well as unlock the new classes and play through them as well. This, along with the ability to customize your character on the fly, effectively removes the need to make multiple characters.

One of the highlights of Skyforge is the beautiful and varied enemy design.

The combat is actually a lot more reflex-based than you’d expect from the genre as well. Rather than let your stats and numbers do the talking for you, you’ve got to use all of your abilities to succeed, picking the right classes and combos to approach each encounter. You’re not just standing around picking abilities, either: due to a dodge move that lets you avoid attacks, you’ll find yourself strafing enemies. The way certain enemies telegraph attacks, as well as their attack patterns, reminded me of bullet hell shooters at times.

Sadly, while the rest of the game does a lot to stand out against the competition, the quest design does not. Rather than have a cohesive world to explore, the majority of Skyforge’s missions are just one-shots. While it’s still in the Beta phase, these quests are basically linear excursions through waves of enemies. Everything looks really nice so far, though, with varied and detailed enemies and environments.

While the levels are fairly linear, they’re still beautiful to look at.

Speaking of the game’s early phase, I ran into quite a few bugs, most of which were in the UI and menus, which are clearly not designed for console. There’s a lot of text for what amounts to not a lot of content, and the menus are frequently unclear on how to use them. In a few cases, I even found what looked like text from the PC version of the game, such as one quest important item I that said to “double click” it to use it. Double click, in this case, meant to equip the item then quickly tap the right directional button twice on my controller, which took a bit of experimentation to figure out. There were also occasional missing animations, like a molotov-wielding enemy that made circles of fire spontaneously appear with no warning or without throwing his weapon every time he I encountered him.

As of right now, Skyforge is a rare true console MMO with fun core gameplay and a neat concept, but quite a few things missing. While it’s definitely something to keep on the lookout for, we’ll only know how well it does when it releases for real.

Christian DeCoster is a freelance writer and indie developer. Before writing at Gaming Trend, he wrote for GameSkinny. Enjoys horror movies good and bad, as well as Southern Bastards, the best comic no one's reading, and weird indie games.

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