Recently, I wrote about having selected an open world survival crafting game to play, Enshrouded. Ten days later, I have already played 85 hours of that game, more than 8 hours per day. It is fair to say that I like Enshrouded a lot. Once upon a time, I was a MMORPG blogger. And the early games of the MMORPG era, like Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies, conjured up a future of the genre with player housing, resource gathering, crafting, and a world that was changed by the actions of the players. That turned out to be a pipe dream. But Enshrouded plays like the MMORPG I've been dreaming about 20 years ago. Obviously that is only possible because it is *not* massively multiplayer, so nobody is spending hours mining a mountain to sculpt it into a giant penis. But Enshrouded does achieve the goal of feeling as if I am interacting with a world, and not just doing endless quests like in World of Warcraft.

Enshrouded is voxel based. And while small areas can't be built upon or destroyed, most of the world can. While Enshrouded doesn't have climbing like in Legend of Zelda, you can use your pickaxe or explosives to cut a staircase into the mountainside and get up that way. Or you can place an altar and build a staircase up. While every altar only covers a certain area in all three dimensions to build on, you can build a nearly endless staircase by building a second altar at the top, and then removing the altar below, repeatedly. I have one altar in the middle of the map above the highest point, the pillars of creation, which allows me to use my glider to get to a lot of places.

But Enshrouded isn't just a resource gathering and crafting game. It is also a role-playing game with action combat, in which you have quests to do, and dungeons to crawl. Your weapons are mostly found by looting various chests or boss monsters, while you armor is mostly crafted. So there is a nice back and forth between a RPG adventuring part, where you go into a new region to do quests, kill monsters, and gain xp and levels, and a crafting / building part, where you see a new mineral vein in that new region and start mining it, or chop a new sort of tree for a new type of wood. In some cases it is up to you whether you would like for example to harvest plants in the wild, or whether after finding the first plant you turn that into seedlings and start getting that resource by farming. Even animals can be tamed and put into a barn in your base, which makes getting wool from yaks easier than hunting them.

Your base can be rather simple: You need a roof over your head, some beds for crafting NPCs, some chests for storage, and some machines for crafting. You can make it fancier, and some decoration adds to your comfort, giving you a nice buff after leaving your base for some time. But you can make it even much fancier with purely decorative stuff. Sometimes at the bottom of a dungeon the reward isn't just some weapon, but a new type of building block. While your first base will be a log hut or rough stone building, as that will be the first building blocks you get, you will get a huge variety of those blocks over the game. That allows you to build anything from medieval city houses to haunted castles to marble palaces. It just depends on how much time you are willing to spend to gather the necessary resources and build the base of your dreams.

There are two major progression systems in Enshrouded. One is a classic xp and level system, giving you skill points for a skill tree, in which you can specialize. Do you want to be a mage? A barbarian? A ranger? A warrior? An assassin? There are lots of possibilities, and you can easily respec if you aren't happy with the result. The other progression system is the level of your flame altar. Parts of the world are covered in a poisonous fog of different intensity, becoming stronger the further from the start you go. The higher your flame altar level, the higher intensity fog you can enter, and the longer you can stay inside. The fog that is too high level for you is very clearly colored red, and kills you within seconds. So you need to increase your flame altar level, which works by providing a mixture of gatherable resources and boss monster heads.

What I personally love about Enshrouded is that it has variable difficulty, which you can fine tune to your needs. I don't like action combat very much, but I can increase my health and damage output and decrease the strength of the monsters, so the point where combat is neither trivial nor too difficult for me. Other players might like the combat but might want to increase the resource yield from gathering, so as to make that less of a grind for them.

While Enshrouded is technically still in early access, it is a far more finished and polished game than several other games that are officially already released. The full release version is planned for autumn of this year, but there will be another large content patch before that, and the game has had multiple large content patches in the past two years since early access started. The last big content patch added water to the game, with everything from diving for treasures, fishing, or building a water wheel powered machine. The amount of content Enshrouded had, and the rate of addition of new content, are great. It isn't an endless game, but it is easy to spend 100+ hours in Enshrouded. Recommended!

- posted by Tobold @ 10:47 AM Permanent Link