Ars Notoria Review Summary

Enjoyable Gameplay, High Potential: Players find the core gameplay loop fun and engaging, noting its significant potential for future development as an Early Access title. The game generally runs smoothly with impressive performance at higher resolutions and few game-breaking bugs, enhancing overall enjoyment.

Impressive Indie Development: Reviewers are consistently impressed by the game's overall scope and quality, especially considering it was developed by a small team of only two people. This achievement highlights the developers' ambition and talent in creating a substantial title.

Rich Content, Deep Exploration: Reviewers appreciate the vast amount of content, including a large map with distinct biomes, numerous dungeons, and a wide array of skills and features. The game offers significant choice in builds and exploration, contributing to extensive replayability and an adventurous feel.

Unique Survival RPG Blend: The game is praised for its fresh and unique take on the survival genre, artfully blending elements from RuneScape, Kenshi, and Medieval Dynasty. Players particularly highlight the intriguing magic system, the generated world, and innovative NPC recruit/relationship systems.

Solid Crafting & Building: The crafting system is considered comprehensive and innovative, offering next-generation mechanics within the genre. Players enjoy the freedom and flexibility of the building system, further enhanced by streamlined resource gathering and automation features that reduce grind.

Outdated and low-quality visuals.: The game's graphics are frequently criticized for being low-quality, blurry, and looking outdated, sometimes compared to games from the early 2000s. Visuals are described as 'crappy' and 'eye-searing,' negatively impacting the game's overall presentation.

Severe performance and stability issues.: The game suffers from significant optimization problems, leading to frequent frame drops, severe lag, crashes, and abnormal GPU heating. Players encounter issues like prolonged loading screens and menus becoming unresponsive, requiring game restarts that are often slow or ineffective.

Unpolished and unfinished game state.: Players widely report the game feels unrefined, janky, and incomplete, suffering from pervasive bugs across many systems, especially in multiplayer. Many feel it was released prematurely, lacking the expected polish even for an Early Access title, leading to disappointment after a long development wait.

Combat lacks impact and polish.: The combat system is criticized for being clunky, simplistic, and lacking satisfying impact, often described as 'hitting air'. Players feel that weapon skill sets are poorly designed, making combat a weak point of the game's launch experience.

Unreliable multiplayer connectivity.: Many players report significant issues connecting to online multiplayer, including persistent connection failures and difficulty joining via platforms like Steam. This severely hampers the ability to play cooperatively, a key feature for many.

Familiar Crafting, Grindy Materials: Players find the core building and crafting mechanics familiar, akin to other survival crafters, including standard gathering and workbench systems. However, some materials are described as super grindy. There's also a notable 'one-stop production system' and a specific request for an auto-alignment mode for building to improve furniture and plant placement.

Evolving Multiplayer Features: Multiplayer is currently in testing, allowing players to visit each other's worlds. Feedback regarding loot mechanics is mixed, with mentions of both shared resources and independent loot drops. Players explicitly suggest an option to toggle independent loot drops, indicating a desire for more control or clarity.

Dual Camera Modes: The game provides two distinct camera modes: one that maintains a forward-facing perspective with a cursor, and a free-roaming mode. Players can conveniently switch between these modes using a configurable button, offering flexibility in gameplay perspective.

Dominant Gun Usage: One player reported heavy use of guns during their playtime, suggesting that firearms might be a prominent or highly effective combat option. This observation is based on limited feedback.

Poor game optimization: Many players report significant performance issues, including sluggishness, stuttering, and poor graphic performance. Excessively long loading times are also a frequent complaint, indicating a general need for better optimization across the game.

Horse proximity causes lag: A specific performance problem has been identified where being near a tamed horse causes severe frame rate drops. This suggests a targeted optimization issue related to certain in-game assets or mechanics.

Game needs significant polish: Many players acknowledge the game's potential but strongly advise against purchasing or playing in its current state due to numerous flaws, bugs, and unfinished aspects. They recommend waiting for substantial patches, often suggesting 1-2 years for improvement, with some even refunding or pausing play until then.

Niche appeal for genre fans: The game is specifically recommended for enthusiasts of open-world survival crafting RPGs, particularly those who enjoy 'janky' experiences akin to Gothic or Outward. Players within this niche are more likely to overlook current imperfections and find enjoyment in the core gameplay loop.

Good value for supporters: For those willing to support early access development, the game's current price point (e.g., $20) is considered a worthwhile investment, despite its flaws. However, some advise caution for players who cannot easily gamble the cost on an unfinished product.

Players abandoning the game: A subset of players has decided to stop playing the game entirely, indicating a significant level of frustration with the current state. They are moving on or uninstalling, suggesting that the current experience is not compelling enough to retain them.

Unacceptable load times: One player specifically cited extremely long and unacceptable load times as a reason the game is unplayable. This highlights a critical technical performance issue that severely impacts the gameplay experience.

Enhance accessibility & localization: Players desire proper controller support for platforms like the Steam Deck to improve accessibility. Russian localization was a requested feature, with some feedback indicating it is planned for December.

Early Access state & small team: The game is recognized as being in a very early Early Access state (version 0.4.0), implying many features are yet to be implemented. Reviewers frequently acknowledge the small development team (reportedly two people), which provides context for the current state and number of bugs, though some express concern about the scope of an open-world survival game for such a team.

Address pricing & value concerns: Some players question the current Early Access price, feeling it may be too high for the game's present state and content. There's a sentiment among some indie game players that they should not feel like they are 'paying for nothing,' though awareness of standard refund policies exists.

Desire for multiplayer support: There is a strong interest in playing the game with friends. Players explicitly request dedicated servers to facilitate and enhance a cooperative multiplayer experience.

Publisher support suggested: One reviewer suggested that the publisher, Lilith, should provide technical support and performance-related guidance to assist the small development team.