Players consistently praise the game's deep and engaging core gameplay loop, offering extensive content, freedom, and replayability. It provides a satisfying sense of progression and is enjoyable for both solo and group play, despite minor technical issues.
The game is highly praised for its comprehensive and addictive survival crafting mechanics, including robust farming, animal taming, and an extensive, well-designed base building system. Players appreciate the depth of crafting recipes, skill trees, and resource gathering, which provide long-term engagement.
The game offers a highly engaging multiplayer experience, particularly when played with friends or in a clan, enhancing both cooperative and competitive aspects. Players enjoy the large-scale PvP battles and the social interaction that makes the world feel alive.
The game features a unique and engaging directional combat system, often compared to Mount & Blade, which offers tactical depth and satisfying feedback. Combined with meaningful RPG-style skill progression, it provides an immersive experience that rewards strategic play.
Reviewers consistently praise the game's stunning and immersive graphics, featuring beautifully designed landscapes, detailed environments, and impressive visual effects. The well-optimized engine allows for smooth performance within its vast and open world.
Negatives:
The game suffers from severe optimization issues, leading to constant lag, stuttering, rubberbanding, and frequent crashes. Long loading times and low frame rates, even on high-end hardware, significantly hinder the gameplay experience.
Players find the game excessively grindy, requiring immense time investment for resource gathering, crafting, and skill progression. This slow pace makes gameplay feel like a chore, especially for solo players, and often lacks meaningful rewards.
The user interface is widely described as cluttered, unintuitive, and poorly designed, with nested menus and overlapping text. Additionally, translations are consistently poor, often nonsensical or incomplete, making it difficult for non-English speakers to understand game mechanics.
The game struggles with balancing its PvP and PvE modes, with PvP often being overly intense and leading to significant loss of progress for players. PvE content is also criticized for being underdeveloped, and both modes suffer from issues like hostile player behavior and resource monopolization.
The building system is criticized for its limitations, such as restrictive shapes and difficult placement mechanics, often requiring flat terrain. Players also report numerous bugs, including snapping issues and rapid structure decay, making base construction a tedious experience.
Gameplay:
The game features a core loop of extensive resource gathering, crafting, and base building within a survival sandbox environment. Progression is skill-based and often slow, encouraging AFK activities and significant time investment.
The game is primarily designed for multiplayer cooperation, often requiring guilds or alliances for progression and large-scale activities like city building and clan wars. Solo players will face significant challenges and limitations.
A significant technical issue prevents players from entering the game world due to an unresponsive "submit" button on the character creation screen. This bug has caused frustration and prevented many from experiencing the game after large downloads.
Combat features an 8-directional attack and block system, similar to Mount & Blade, requiring strategic engagement. The game also includes extensive military sandbox elements, allowing players to raise armies, tame warriors, and engage in large-scale sieges with crafted siege weapons.
The game offers a multi-server system with options for official, private, and self-hosted servers, supporting both PvP and PvE gameplay. Players can transfer characters, equipment, and resources between servers and regions, facilitating dynamic player interaction and trade.
Performance:
The game suffers from significant client-side performance issues, including constant stuttering, low frame rates, frequent crashes, and excessively long loading times, even on high-end PCs. Many players report the game is unoptimized, leading to hardware strain and instability, despite attempts to adjust settings or troubleshoot.
Players frequently experience severe server-side lag, high ping spikes (up to 1000ms), rubber banding, and disconnections, especially on official and European servers. These issues significantly degrade the gameplay experience, making the game feel unplayable for many without external tools.
The game exhibits noticeable delays in character movement and action feedback during combat. This lack of immediate responsiveness makes the gameplay feel sluggish and less precise.
Many custom game modes are inaccessible to players, requiring either specific DLC or a password to join. This limits player access to community-created content.
The game is noted for consuming significantly more electrical power compared to other graphically intensive games. This can be a concern for energy efficiency and hardware strain.
Recommendations:
Many reviewers reported significant technical problems, including numerous bugs, performance issues, server instability, and lack of polish. These issues frequently led to frustration, uninstalls, and refund requests, hindering the overall player experience.
Many reviewers found the game difficult or unsuitable for solo players, often recommending playing with a large group of friends or on private servers. Progression and combat were cited as particularly challenging for individual players.
Reviewers frequently noted the game requires a significant time commitment and involves excessive grinding, making it unsuitable for players with limited time or patience. This aspect often led to frustration and abandonment of the game.
Several reviewers expressed concerns about the game's monetization, including microtransactions and perceived pay-to-win elements. Many felt the game was not worth its full price, or even discounted prices, given its current state and issues.
A vast number of reviews strongly advised against purchasing or playing the game in its current state, with many expressing regret, requesting refunds, or uninstalling. This sentiment is often a culmination of the various issues experienced.
Miscellaneous:
Many players express excitement and hope for future DLCs, features, and general game improvements. They are actively following the game's development and wish for it to become more popular and refined.
Many players tried the game during free weekends or trial periods, often motivated by positive recommendations. While some purchased the game, others found the experience frustrating, leading to a 'lost relaxing weekend' and negative reviews.
Players report the game has significant depth, requiring hundreds of hours to explore and master. This makes it a substantial time commitment, with some players even uninstalling due to its time-consuming nature despite enjoying it.
A significant portion of players prefer playing the game solo or in PvE mode, often at a relaxed pace. Some avoid official servers based on other reviews, opting for private servers or single-player experiences.
The game has experienced a significant decline in player count, leading to official servers being shut down and requiring migration or merging. This has impacted the once lively large-scale PvP and overall player base.