So I was watching Fractured for a good while, 198 level foundation and all that, and finally there is a PvP focused test that I can enjoy, and I can finally whine about PvP balance in a prealpha like I threatened to do months ago.

I'll try to not to be biased, but I'll probably fail, so what I write is written from a perspective of a assassin-wannabe character with 16/20/1610/7/13 stats Abilities are: Shadow Step, Shadow Walk, Shadow Dance, Crippling Strike, Death Mark, Strike Wounds, Blinding Strike. Talent wise - stealth and dodge is maxed, rest is dumped into the perception tree, with an "inevitable" perk.

The most annoying problem to date
So the first thing that I'd like to notice right away is that it's way too easy to esacape a fight. You can simply walk away from almost any build. Instant bandages paired with huge passive HP regeneration ensure that even if you'll manage to get some hits on a fleeing target, it the long run, it'd just regenerate all the health back.

The most annoying glitch to date
Next, a weird glitch prevents proper testing, as sometimes attacks just stop connecting for no reason. No blocks, no dodges, no ability procs, just poking the air. It often happens in PvP, less often in PvE if PvP flag is on. In the latter case, turning the PvP flag off helps, in PvP - nothing helps. Apparently this glitch only takes place with daggers and fists, can't even imagine how's it possible. But it's annoying as hell and makes me shriek at the screen like a little angry schoolgirl. Please fix this shit.

Popular archetypes and lack of flexibility
Overall character roles seem to have split into three categories for now - archers, warriors and mages. They're all played more or less the same, but differences are noticable. I haven't met many people who play assassin-like archetype, probably because of the glitch, and little to no people creating anything outside of the standart roles.

I personally think that the reason for this is abilities being too restricted. For example, all the invocation abilities are bound to int and can't be used by any character that isn't int-heavy, while they could have some secondary effects which would scale with other stats as well. Touches are restricted to unarmed only, but they could be made to be used with any weapon, giving unarmed builds an advantage in attack speed.

Most assassination abilities are not that strong that they should be bound to light armor only, besides, some of them are outright bad at the moment, like Assassination, that eats up a whooping 6 memory points and deals a flat damage multiplied by target's missing health percentage.

There are some rather unrestricted abilities, sure, but for the most part, many, many abilities are very restricted, especially to int-heavy characters.

General PvP flow
What feels good is relative freedom of building, even if quite restricted. What feels not that good from a perspective of a melee character, is that pretty much all the fights are either three button presses + hold click and waiting for who dies first, or one of the participants running away with no chance to catch him. It gets more fun when you play against ranged characters, but it's very frustrating to try to catch them, as melee weapons' reach seems to be so little that even if you reach a running target and perform a hit - it runs away before the hit is landed. Not that it makes ranged characters impossible to kill, no but the whole fight is centered around trying to get a hit in, I mean, not fighting the enemy, but fighting weak weapon reach + ping.

TTK
This is a matter of preference mostly, but I feel that TTK is way too big. People are simply not dying. Especially if you're fighting a tanky build - it takes literally forever, very often this fight just never ends. Quick fights may take place, but they usually involve a newbie mage with bad awareness.

TTK and CC duration
Mycharacter has very low charisma, not much constitution, so it should suffer from CC quite alot, however it doesn't happen. With TTK we currently have, CC doesn't do much. Say, bash only lets you get one more hit in, when you often need well above 20 hits to hope to finish the fight. IMO either TTK should be reduced or CC duration - increased.

Purely assassin things
Just some feedback on my own character.
I tried to make something resembling a usual assassin. It should be a burst heavy character that's bad at sustaining prolonged fights.
First disappointment was the huge TTK that doesn't quite allow creating a burst-focused character for quick fights.
Second one - lack of a proper opener. That doesn't allow to create a burst focused character at all.
Third one is stealth. It's bugged and for some reason people can just see me from time to time, from any distance. To be really invisible you must use Shadow Walk when you're already rendered on an enemy screen it seems, as rendering a character (like if someone logs in onto your head) shows it without stealth.
Shadow dance is bugged as well, and it's animation can be seen even if you're invisible. Which is ironic, since it's expected to make you more invisible, if anything.
Forth one is Assassinate. The icon looks cool, the name suggests that it hits hard but really that's not the case. It consumes insane amounts of mana for a str/dex build, requires huge amount of memory points, and results in 12*missinghp% damage if you have maxed perception. So if an enemy is at 30% hp that's about 800 damage, which seems good on paper, but in practice this ability requires so much mana and memory points that you're handicapping yourself a ton. With constant bandage use, single shadow dance will give tons more damage overall, strike wounds + any wound of choice will give tons more damage as well, with much less requirements. I'd suggest to make this ability a very strong opener instead of a finisher. And in it's current state it looks especially bad if compared to WOP:Kill, which is simply better in everything.

Also, primitive dagger description says that it ignores 40% of enemy's armor, but it doesn't seem to work.

Overall gameplay is to just click someone and press wounds abilities from time to time, not very dynamic if you ask me.

General balance
From my personal perspective, the strongest builds are con-based fighters, followed by archers and mages. Can't place thief-like characters anywhere because of bias.

Fighters are clear winners because of second wind, plate armor and frenzy. Second wind replenishes full HP to anyone, be it 1.5k hp squishy character, or 3k+ hp armored one. Con based fighters have lots of HP, armor and resistances, so they can use second wind more than once during the fight, and frenzy basically gives lots of DPS and movement speed. In both cases, those abilities require no mana, so int can be dropped, and as evasion mechanics are really weird (0 accuracy character hits a 700 evasion character with about 50% chance), perception can be dropped as well. Some people said that full plate will probably be expensive if it would be crafted and not given away for free, if that's the case - fighters will have it much worse, as they wouldn't be that strong without plate.

Archers have good burst damage and kiting capabilities.

And mages, well, since the crit chance fix I didn't see many of them.

Overall, second wind/frenzy seem overpowered, word skills probably need to be looked at, and there are some trash abilities like assassinate or bleeding strike, well, apart from that game feels relatively balanced and very playable.

Misc
Lots of love for friendly fire. It helped me to 3v1 once, and will, in the future, help to fight zerging.

Personally, I just hope that devs will stay true to their vision. If you look through Albion's patch notes you'll see that it had good direction at first, but since Carleon update they've butchered their economy, capitalized more on instanced areas, which is the opposite of what should've been done, and there's also little to no new content, by which I mean once the "meta" has settled and all cookie cutter builds has been found, there is little to no ways to invent any new playstyles, etc., etc.

All problems with Albion are rooted with devs losing their vision and having wrong priorities as a result.

I just hope Fractured won't repeat their mistakes, which is going to be rather easy because of the unorthodox gamedesign.

I have this bug with a dagger, it feels like sometimes attacks are just not working, which is not only harmful for game enjoyment, but for testing. Can't actually approximate my strength against various builds when 2/3 of my attacks are just not connecting for no reason.

@gothix gave them some numbers so now it's easier to read.

Happy to see and greet a good community of a promising game. I'm looking forward to hunt you later somewhere in the alpha :^)

I'm a veteran-timewaster and a MMORPG enthusiast, with a bit of EvE and Ultima, and lots of Ragnarok, Rift, SWTOR, Aika, Aion, Warhammer, Albion, Lineage II, Allods, Royal Quest, Tree of Savior, Guild Wars II, Neverwinter, World of Warcraft, Skyforge, Perfect World and probably more, experience behind my back. Hope to spend a couple of years more, enjoying this game with you guys.

@gothix Pretty sure that if implemeted, wasd-controls would be only for you. Of course it's a bit of hyperbole, but wasd in isometric games is so impractical and uncomfortable, it's the same as asking devs to make the game playable with gamepads. The amount of players who would actually use this is so small that it won't worth the effort to work on.

Isometric WASD could be seen in Tree of Savior for example, and it was horrible, was one of the major downsides of the game, while classic isometric point-and-click is a well-established standart which is working for 20+ years already.

@Tuoni atlest we can hope for it.
Vanilla wow's best plus was the atmosphere the community created, it will be a fake time travel.
But atleast PvE enthusiasts should try oldschool Naxx.

Best PvP is naturally occuring solo or small scale PvP. 1v1, 1v2, 1v3, 2v2, etc.
Even better if it has a reason. For example, I want to gather magic mushrooms and catch fairy butterflies that can be found only in this area, and here is a guy that's giving me a competition for those. Of course he should be forced to leave this spot in a gruesome way.

Second best is coordinated small scale fights for resources. Say, 5 guys are mining carelessly. So another group appears and attacks them, and a fight ensures. Whoever wins, gets a cart full of good stuff.

Third best, is a siege scenario. Where you participate a town/castle/whatever siege as a guild member, as a mercenary, or as a guy who asked to join just for fun.

This might be the best PvP absolutely, if implemented right. Requires correct town/castle planning, various tasks, objectives and possibilities, so that every build will have something to do. Some hold the main gate, others press them. Some guard the smaller passages with smaller groups, some are doing infiltration, espionage kind of work, doing some kind of sabotaging and killing behind enemy lines, etc.

And this might be the worst, if it's implemented in a bad way, where sieges will end up as an AoE spam galore, with only "Tank", "Ranged DPS", and "Healer/support" type of characters having place in this clusterkek of a PvP (See: Albion).

@jetah said in What’s the difference of Fractured with Diablo 3?:

@dcccxix
level to 70, bounties, rift for gear while running grifts for leg gems.

i don't see that as a theme park. you can skip bounties (if your build doesn't need the royal ring).

It doesn't matter, you don't affect the world and you have no freedom. You just walk through fancy corridors until the game storyline is over, after that you grind rifts until your fingers fall off.

@kralith said in What can we learn from other similar pojects?:

Don‘t let the community too much influence your path of the game, especially not if the requested features don‘t follow the vision you have.

This pretty much.
Albion got destroyed because of bad game-design decisions, because they didn't filter their feedback well enough. So the most whiny people got what they wanted and the game became much worse.

I hope devs do read the forum, and this thread in particular.

I'll double the "keep your core vision". For example, I'd really like to see any vertical progression of a character, even if just a tiny one, and many other people will want the same, and many other things on top of that. Filter the feedback you gather, and don't try to implement feedback-based changes as fast as possible. Even if 80% of playerbase whines on some topic, it doesn't mean that you should change it. Analyze it all, come to conclusions, and then find the solution, gradually. Having some problem in your game that you've made yourselves, won't affect your playerbase as much as catering to some chosen fraction of players, which may be seen by players as changing of the game's direction, which may cause many people to leave, and in MMORPGs it's very hard to get your players to return, if you lose any of your initial fan/playerbase - it will be very hard to regain those numbers.

So don't copy others' mistakes and just make what you intended to make in the first place.

@spoletta
That's true I guess, since I don't know how hard is it to obtain heavy armor economy wise, and even tho I believe that with established economy they won't be as rare as it might seem (how it always happened in every single MMO that had a mistake of underestimating it's players), I take your word for granted.

Still, it's conceptually imperfect, because such approach removes possibilities instead of adding them. As stated before, heavily armored caster with limited mobility would be an interesting character, as well as heavy archer - basically a walking turret.

Even more, it's not limited to only armor restrictions. For example, conjuration spells can't be casted with any weapon but mage weapon, which could be avoided by swapping weapons right now, but still it prevents many possible builds by locking certain abilities only to certain weapons. I'm not against locking SOME abilities for certain weapon types, but locking the whole ability branch seems a bit too much.

And even more than that, say, conjuration and invocation abilitied are locked behind high int, since their usage with low int is useless at the moment. Instead, they could have some secondary effects. Like ice shards (or whatever that spell is called) could deal damage based on int, freeze(stun) people based on charisma and slow them based on dexterity. So for low int characters damage won't even appear, for low charisma characters - stun wouldn't happen, etc.

Next, I might be mistaken since the test was pretty short and I didn't manage to remember everything, but it seems like archers can't use crippling strike, which would be a perfect ability for them, and IMO there is no reason to restrict them out of it. An example of a better approach is poisoning strike, that works for bows and melee weapons alike, could be used to provide damage, or to create additional wound on a character, etc., so the ability is less restricted and has multiple purposes that leads to it possibly being used in more different builds.

Agreed, and IMO medium/heavy armor should have general penalties. At the moment heavily armored characters don't have movement speed or attack speed penalties, don't have evasion penalties, any penalties, actually.

At the moment it looks like locking them out of most abilities is the way to balance lack of those penalties, but that's not very immersive, and it restricts people from creating some conceptually fun builds like blight knight, battle mage, heavy archer and the like. If you prefer wearing heavy armor, you're pretty much forced into the warfare abilities.

And removing all restrictions would make heavy armor the only option, so armor penalties is the best option it seems.

I think I'll post here again so I won't clutter the forum with useless threads about purely dex-assassination melee problems.

Evasion
So here is an chance to avoid an attack/evasion graph, where z is accuracy.
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/spdpzdyws8

We can see that even if character has zero accuracy, he'll still hit targets with 500 evasion with 60% chance.
A character with a decent accuracy of 400 will hit a target with 400 evasion about 78% of the time.

That means that evasion and accuracy are not balanced with one another.

This makes sense since otherwise characters with low perception/accuracy wouldn't be viable unless they're casters. The problem arises from the fact that evasion is the only protection of a dexterity melee character.

Ranged characters have range as their main source of defence, str/con based melee characters have high mitigation from armor and big HP pool, however for a dex-based character his only protection is evasion, and it can't compete with range or heavy armor.

So in order to be semi-viable one should either be either a ranged charater, or go deep into con/str, which places evasion in a position of a complimentary bonus.

From what I see in the game currently, balance wise, it should be outweighted by abilities that benefit from dex/per and can't be used with heavy and/or medium armor, however at their current state those abilities fail to do so, infact, they're not strong enough to be limited to be used with light armor only.

Those abilities are expected to either provide a huge DPS boost to compensate for lack of survivability, or some ways to increase character's longevity in the fight, current dex abilities fail to do so. They're pretty much centered around attack speed, applying pure damage, applying debuffs and crit (talking mainly about assassination abilities here).

Attack speed only increases with pure dex, unlike strength where weapon damage increased both by the stat itself and relative talents, for example. my character with maxed dex has 10% attack speed (and 700 evasion) with several enchants, so attack speed scailing is limited. Strike wounds and assasinate provide relatively weak (in practice) damage, as they deal flat damage that has almost no scailing. Shadow dance only scales with stealth, and in return, stealth doesn't do anything combat-wise apart from scailing SD. Abilities which are guaranteed crits are simply not strong enough to mitigate said problems, investing in crit in general seems a waste of resources at this point.

To put it simple, assassination abilities don't outweight warfare abilities, but they're locked for light armor and light weapons only. And if warfare skills are not much worse dps-wise than assassination ones, why lock yourself into light armor?

Stats
For a decent caster build you need int and con, for decent melee build you need str and con, for a decent dex build, however, you need str (to actually deal damage), con (to live for a while), int (because shadow dance, mark of death, assassinate require tons of mana), and dex itself, which is a bare minimum. There are not enough points for all of this, unless you go unarmed with touches which allows you to dump str and kill two birds with one stone (int).
If light weapons would scale their damage with dex instead of str it would help a ton, but as it is now, there is simply not enough stats for this kind of build.

Misc
Mark of death and strike wounds break stealth when used. I don't know if it's intended to be this way or not, but it makes stealth even less useful.

Strike wounds and shadow dance have animation time that eats up precious combat time and doesn't allow to turn them on and off on demand to, say, fight mana problems and only use them when needed, without rooting yourself for a second while turning them on, and it actually matters alot as well.

Primitive dagger recipe says that this dagger ignores 40% of enemies' armor, but it doesn't work for primitive dagger, or the basic dagger you can get from the bank currently.

Assassination ability branch is almost the least bursty branch of all at the moment, it has no good openers, no good CC, barely any survivability and it works best to make a bag of trash lurking in the shadows kind of character, that or a PvE DPS. The only ability from this branch that actually sees any use is shadow walk.

So I was watching Fractured for a good while, 198 level foundation and all that, and finally there is a PvP focused test that I can enjoy, and I can finally whine about PvP balance in a prealpha like I threatened to do months ago.

I'll try to not to be biased, but I'll probably fail, so what I write is written from a perspective of a assassin-wannabe character with 16/20/1610/7/13 stats Abilities are: Shadow Step, Shadow Walk, Shadow Dance, Crippling Strike, Death Mark, Strike Wounds, Blinding Strike. Talent wise - stealth and dodge is maxed, rest is dumped into the perception tree, with an "inevitable" perk.

The most annoying problem to date
So the first thing that I'd like to notice right away is that it's way too easy to esacape a fight. You can simply walk away from almost any build. Instant bandages paired with huge passive HP regeneration ensure that even if you'll manage to get some hits on a fleeing target, it the long run, it'd just regenerate all the health back.

The most annoying glitch to date
Next, a weird glitch prevents proper testing, as sometimes attacks just stop connecting for no reason. No blocks, no dodges, no ability procs, just poking the air. It often happens in PvP, less often in PvE if PvP flag is on. In the latter case, turning the PvP flag off helps, in PvP - nothing helps. Apparently this glitch only takes place with daggers and fists, can't even imagine how's it possible. But it's annoying as hell and makes me shriek at the screen like a little angry schoolgirl. Please fix this shit.

Popular archetypes and lack of flexibility
Overall character roles seem to have split into three categories for now - archers, warriors and mages. They're all played more or less the same, but differences are noticable. I haven't met many people who play assassin-like archetype, probably because of the glitch, and little to no people creating anything outside of the standart roles.

I personally think that the reason for this is abilities being too restricted. For example, all the invocation abilities are bound to int and can't be used by any character that isn't int-heavy, while they could have some secondary effects which would scale with other stats as well. Touches are restricted to unarmed only, but they could be made to be used with any weapon, giving unarmed builds an advantage in attack speed.

Most assassination abilities are not that strong that they should be bound to light armor only, besides, some of them are outright bad at the moment, like Assassination, that eats up a whooping 6 memory points and deals a flat damage multiplied by target's missing health percentage.

There are some rather unrestricted abilities, sure, but for the most part, many, many abilities are very restricted, especially to int-heavy characters.

General PvP flow
What feels good is relative freedom of building, even if quite restricted. What feels not that good from a perspective of a melee character, is that pretty much all the fights are either three button presses + hold click and waiting for who dies first, or one of the participants running away with no chance to catch him. It gets more fun when you play against ranged characters, but it's very frustrating to try to catch them, as melee weapons' reach seems to be so little that even if you reach a running target and perform a hit - it runs away before the hit is landed. Not that it makes ranged characters impossible to kill, no but the whole fight is centered around trying to get a hit in, I mean, not fighting the enemy, but fighting weak weapon reach + ping.

TTK
This is a matter of preference mostly, but I feel that TTK is way too big. People are simply not dying. Especially if you're fighting a tanky build - it takes literally forever, very often this fight just never ends. Quick fights may take place, but they usually involve a newbie mage with bad awareness.

TTK and CC duration
Mycharacter has very low charisma, not much constitution, so it should suffer from CC quite alot, however it doesn't happen. With TTK we currently have, CC doesn't do much. Say, bash only lets you get one more hit in, when you often need well above 20 hits to hope to finish the fight. IMO either TTK should be reduced or CC duration - increased.

Purely assassin things
Just some feedback on my own character.
I tried to make something resembling a usual assassin. It should be a burst heavy character that's bad at sustaining prolonged fights.
First disappointment was the huge TTK that doesn't quite allow creating a burst-focused character for quick fights.
Second one - lack of a proper opener. That doesn't allow to create a burst focused character at all.
Third one is stealth. It's bugged and for some reason people can just see me from time to time, from any distance. To be really invisible you must use Shadow Walk when you're already rendered on an enemy screen it seems, as rendering a character (like if someone logs in onto your head) shows it without stealth.
Shadow dance is bugged as well, and it's animation can be seen even if you're invisible. Which is ironic, since it's expected to make you more invisible, if anything.
Forth one is Assassinate. The icon looks cool, the name suggests that it hits hard but really that's not the case. It consumes insane amounts of mana for a str/dex build, requires huge amount of memory points, and results in 12*missinghp% damage if you have maxed perception. So if an enemy is at 30% hp that's about 800 damage, which seems good on paper, but in practice this ability requires so much mana and memory points that you're handicapping yourself a ton. With constant bandage use, single shadow dance will give tons more damage overall, strike wounds + any wound of choice will give tons more damage as well, with much less requirements. I'd suggest to make this ability a very strong opener instead of a finisher. And in it's current state it looks especially bad if compared to WOP:Kill, which is simply better in everything.

Also, primitive dagger description says that it ignores 40% of enemy's armor, but it doesn't seem to work.

Overall gameplay is to just click someone and press wounds abilities from time to time, not very dynamic if you ask me.

General balance
From my personal perspective, the strongest builds are con-based fighters, followed by archers and mages. Can't place thief-like characters anywhere because of bias.

Fighters are clear winners because of second wind, plate armor and frenzy. Second wind replenishes full HP to anyone, be it 1.5k hp squishy character, or 3k+ hp armored one. Con based fighters have lots of HP, armor and resistances, so they can use second wind more than once during the fight, and frenzy basically gives lots of DPS and movement speed. In both cases, those abilities require no mana, so int can be dropped, and as evasion mechanics are really weird (0 accuracy character hits a 700 evasion character with about 50% chance), perception can be dropped as well. Some people said that full plate will probably be expensive if it would be crafted and not given away for free, if that's the case - fighters will have it much worse, as they wouldn't be that strong without plate.

Archers have good burst damage and kiting capabilities.

And mages, well, since the crit chance fix I didn't see many of them.

Overall, second wind/frenzy seem overpowered, word skills probably need to be looked at, and there are some trash abilities like assassinate or bleeding strike, well, apart from that game feels relatively balanced and very playable.

Misc
Lots of love for friendly fire. It helped me to 3v1 once, and will, in the future, help to fight zerging.

I have this bug with a dagger, it feels like sometimes attacks are just not working, which is not only harmful for game enjoyment, but for testing. Can't actually approximate my strength against various builds when 2/3 of my attacks are just not connecting for no reason.

Looking forward to it, would be nice to see the prototype of the knowledge system in action.

@Tuoni atlest we can hope for it.
Vanilla wow's best plus was the atmosphere the community created, it will be a fake time travel.
But atleast PvE enthusiasts should try oldschool Naxx.

@Dariusacmar said in WoW Classic is coming:

The amusing thing is, Vanilla wow, or "WoW classic", was exceptionally difficult. Mostly because of the content, but also because of the lack of mounts till high levels, exceptional difficulty getting any sort of large amounts of money unless you were a professional farmer and the required 40 man raids, which actually required virtually every man of that 40 to perform at their best to beat. It was only later, after WotLK came out, that WoW became the pansied down version it proceeded to be after that. So no, not interested at all...it's not like they'd actually release it in it's former/original difficulty, which was why WoW was worth playing up till WotLK.

It was never difficult apart from endgame raids. Whoever says that never player a MMORPG that is difficult.

@Tuoni said in WoW Classic is coming:

WoW Classic is launcing 27 of August 2019. Who is interested to test that out? If you are, what are your expectations? What kind of plans you have?

People are delusional. They think that they'd have the same immersive experience, which is not gonna happen. Vanilla is figured out, FotM builds for every patch are out there, location of every weed to gather is known, strategy for every boss is known, etc. All of this flavored with dozens of addons for retards which tell you where and what to cast, where to go to do your quest, when to evade attacks, etc. Everything bound to gearscore DPS/HPS meters. The exploration element is dead, "Guilds of friends" are dead, "epic adventures and funny stories" are dead. There is nothing to do but chain questing to 60 with quest helper -> raiding with a million addons for retards.

Even more, before WoW was like an extension of WC3 story, now it's in the past, and people treated the game as a game, not as a competition of who gets to 60 faster than others.

It's just a ruse and an attempt of a company, which once made good games, to make people buy their game twice. Same with WC3 remaster everyone is pissing their pants about.

First reason is being rather poor, second reason is not seeing even a prototype of the knowledge system, and no environment interaction that was told about before. Even more, from alpha test I've participated in, seems like things like character movement speed may be changed aswell, as characters fly 1 screen in about a second, which makes it hard do imagine the difference between ranged and melee characters. For me environment interaction and knowledge system are key components which would make a good niche game of Fractured, and to this day make it take the top of the waiting list on par with Camelot Unchained.

Second is the whole kickstarter thing of course. I've tried Legends of Aria recently, which came from kickstarter aswell. Even if they're not as unique in their vision as Fractured, it's still a kickstarter-open-world-sandbox-MMORPG with client side made via Unity, and I noticed that in 4 years of development, on a fucking unity engine, they failed to harness the power of transform.LookAt(), which makes my character shoot arrows out of his ass, and they just got "steam release" making it look like it's a complete product. The only thing that may advocate that is that they probably have one guy doing both backend and client-side. Anyway, if I can make an isometric prototype of a game with 2 stealth systems, physics-based movement, shooting, AI, physics-based traps and triggers, inventory systems, animations, etc., with 5 cans of red bull, google and 20 evenings, than everyone should be able to.
Of couse this casts a shadow on all the similar kickstarter projects. Even more, if we consider Albion Online that shat it's pants by devs completely betraying their vision and their backers and catering to the wrong audience.

But I'm still with you guys, and aim watching closely with my thin wallet ready.

@Gothix said in Fractured = SAO:

I think fun of the Fractured will be not about who has "better gear" but about who has gear more fitted to his build and situation.

It should be about diversity, and creating different builds to counter other builds and creating (customizing) gear to betrer fit your current deck.

Player should then own many sets of gear (and builds) and appropriately use them.

Fractured should be about knowledge and skills of the player. Gear will only be used as supplement to that.

I had same thoughts. Basically, what should keep players in the game is a search of new ways to customize your playstyle. However what I'm kinda worried about, this system should be very fleshed out to keep people entertained for long, and some politics should come into play later, aswell.

So far we have a unity client with many placeholders, and while the direction is right it will take time to see what game designer has in his sleeve.