Villagers & Heroes - Played for a few hours

TheLizardbones

Villagers & Heroes is a F2P MMORPG available now on Steam.  I've been glancing at this game for awhile and wanted to take a closer look, but did not have time until recently.  It is, as far as I know, an Indie MMORPG.  I've played the game for about three hours, and made it to Ardent City.  Here's a brief overview of my experience with the game so far

 

Getting the Game.  It's easy enough to get the game on Steam.  Just select it, and it will download/install just like every other Steam game.

 

Account Setup.  The game logs you in automatically.  I am assuming the login comes from Steam, but I really have no idea where, it just logs me in and I could play.  Very simple, very easy.  More games should do something like this.

 

Game Play Basics.  There are four classes; Priest, Wizard, Hunter and Warrior.  I chose a Priest.  Combat is tab/click target with hotbar skills to click or hit with your keyboard.  The UI is pretty basic, chat in lower left corner, map in upper right, skills are bottom center with a menu in the upper left corner.  Your health, spirit and XP are on the skill bar.  I'm a little hazy on this, but progression seems to be through questing.  There is an extensive crafting progression system, but I think crafting XP is crafting XP while questing/combat XP is questing/combat XP.  There are many crafting skills to choose from, and they are all easy to use.  Basically click a resource, or click a crafting station and if you have the materials and skill level, you can do whatever it is you need to do.  So far I have Gathered Wood, Gathered Fruit/Crops, Mined, Fished, Carpentered, Tailored, Blacksmithed and Cooked.  There is also an Auction House and Gnome Workbenches where you can upgrade your gear.  There is also a bank type deal where you can put extra stuff.

 

Game Play Not As Basic.  There is an NPC you can talk to that will let you visit "Villages" which are collections of player owned houses.  Looks like there are both Guild and non-Guild villages.  Additional game play options such as farming and animal husbandry open up when you purchase a house.  Villages themselves seem to have tasks and jobs to do, where the village levels up and brings advantages to the players who live there.  There was a sign board in a village I visited where the players were building or expanding a kitchen and had to bring supplies.  There is a limit to the things you can sell to a vendor, so your options for many items are to trash the item or try and sell it to other players through trading or the auction house.

 

Graphics.  The graphics are stylized, in the vein of Wizard 101.  Definitely aiming at a more juvenile or "Saturday Morning" audience.  They are decently well done, just very stylized.  The animations are pretty clunky.  The characters look a lot like they are "floating" instead of running.

The quest UI was a bit hard to read.  The font was hard to read and I found myself scooching up to my monitor to read what was going on.  Many quests involve a question/response or at least a click/response and reading it was not intuitive.

 

Combat.  The combat, like the graphics animations, is pretty clunky.  However, part of this can be attributed to my not spending my Talent Points so I was level 5 with a level 1 talent pool.  However, the combat was not frustrating.  The Secret World had a much more developed combat system, but it ended up being frustrating.  Not so here.  I would compare it to early WoW and I can see how it might improve or become more interesting in the future.  Maybe.  I'll have to wait and see.

 

Enemy AI.  I'm hoping this is just because I was in the early, tutorial area but the enemy AI was about as basic as you can get.  The combat itself was almost interesting or at least showed potential.  One early boss had two minions that would heal him and I had to kill the minions first, then kill the boss.  However, all of the mobs just stood there unless I attacked them.  Even with the world as stylized as it was, I kept expecting some sort of reaction from the mobs, but I got nothing.  They really are just mobile objects that dispense loot when destroyed.  Again, this might change now that I've made it to the first city.

 

The World.  I rarely, if ever, pay much attention to a world's lore.  Basically you are a refugee, and you're trying to build up some power in order to attack the big bad guy.  Pretty standard Western Fantasy stuff.  All the NPCs have some voice responses (hello in a variety of languages) and the text dialogues for the characters are complete, with optional questions you can ask most NPCs to fill out the world's story.

 

The Players.  They all seem pretty friendly.  They were actually a little more social than I'm comfortable with, which means they actually spoke to me and didn't challenge me to a duel or try to tea-bag me.  I am, I'm sorry to say, a very solo player, and not at all outgoing socially.  Not on a 1 on 1 basis anyway.  I did gather from conversations that there are guilds, guild banks, guild tasks, etc.  A lot of this probably centers around villages, since it looks like villages can be leveled up.

 

What I Did For Three Hours.  Actually, I spent a lot of time gathering and crafting.  The systems are not deep, but they are pretty comprehensive.  I could shear sheep, or pet them when their wool had not completely grown back, pick apples, mine for copper, and so on.  I probably could have farmed mobs too.  The quests were not arranged in a hub, at least not before Ardent City.  I had a single quest chain to follow, and there were optional quests that I could pick up if I wanted off to the sides of where I was going.  One quest giver just kept having more quests, one after the other, so I just kept doing them.

 

Money.  So far, I haven't felt like I needed to buy anything.  I haven't seen anything in the game pushing me to buy anything either.  You can buy extra bag and bank slots, as well as a house in a village.  Presumably you can also buy a village itself too, but there are no new village slots open right now.

 

My review may sound on the negative side, but the game is fairly engaging, at least in the short term.  I will continue to play for awhile to see what else the game has.  I don't know if I'll buy a house or not, but I'll keep playing for a little while at least.

:-)

 

Azrile

Nice review. I played for about 2 hours

Overall it was just a very simplistic MMO.   Many crafting options,  but you make a lot of useless stuff.

I had three big gripes with the game.

1.  The combat is very VERY simplistic ( made it to the main city and was doing the quests there).  You just don´t have any decisions to make or any tactics whatsover.  Run up to mob, press 1 a  few times.   Of course this was only after a couple of hours of playing, so maybe it gets more complicated later on.   My biggest beef was that there was nothing you could do to prevent death.  I got to a quest boss mob, inside some indoor orchard type thing.  I attack him, I see I am losing.. and nothing I can do but die.  No ability to kite or run away.

2.  Quests were just kinda willy-nilly.  I am not a big fan of quest hubs, but having quests that send you back and forth to the same areas you just finished feel weird.

3.  Housing -  I played long enough and had enough currency to where I was able to get a house.. only problem was that every town was full.  No housing spots available.  This is fine with some games, but a big part of this game is having your own house/farm and becoming part of the village.  Once I couldn´t find a house, the only gameplay left is just the disjointed questing system.

A f2p game with simple graphics.  Probably a lot of fun for someone who doesn´t have any experience with AAA MMOs.

TheLizardbones

There were housing spaces available a couple days ago, but there you couldn't start a whole new Village.

 

Also, there is an energy system in place so as each skill gets to level 16, you have to manage you energy in some way.  This was in place to keep people from just grinding away every skill in the game and becoming uber-powerful.  However, they've rethought this and at some point are going to do away with the energy system.  Not sure what they will replace it with though.  Personally I'm not a fan of energy systems, so I think this will probably be a good thing.  They are adding new content and they just released an expansion, so they are making money.  If they are doing away with the energy system, then they must be making money some place else. :-)

 

RogueTroopa

Played and uninstalled aftera minute. There's a reason it's f2p and in the steam bargain basement area. Total rubbish

Dibdabs

I gave it a few hours, but eventually uninstalled it.  It's pretty insubstantial fare.