If there’s one thing MMORPGs are best known for, it’s grinding. Now, there’s nothing terribly wrong with getting your grind on – there’s a certain pleasure in walking to a good farming spot, stocking up on potions, and spending an hour or more clicking through enemies while your level dings up. But that approach isn’t for everyone, leaving them unable to enjoy the more sociable side of MMOs as a result.
Enter Fractured Online, where grinding isn’t the only way to improve your skills. In Fractured Online, knowledge is everything, and only by experiencing a wide variety of interactions and enemies in the world can you hope to become a powerful hero. With a huge skill tree available, your build – and your destiny – is yours to control.
But that’s not the only cliche that Fractured Online does away with. Finding swords on the corpse of a ghost? Don’t bet on it. Repetitive combat built around having the biggest sword with the highest damage? No chance. It’s a new approach to a classic genre in so many ways.
We’ve barely scratched the surface here, so let’s take a closer look at what you’ll be doing in Fractured Online as you expand your knowledge and your skills.
Knowledge is power
In traditional MMORPGs, levelling up is the only way to improve your skills. And levelling up usually boils down to killing a ton of enemies, slowly building up your experience bar, and then earning maybe one attribute point to spend on slightly improving your strength.
Fractured Online still has skills to unlock and plenty of combat – we’ll get to that soon – but you won’t be tasked with beating up a horde of giant rats for three hours to be able to wear a new hat. Instead, you’ll earn Knowledge Points from a wide variety of activities, from wandering the world to, yes, killing monsters.
When you enter the world of Fractured Online, your character knows as much about the world as you do – very little. Instead of having a map full of quest markers and locations to set off to, you’ll be given a lot of question marks to gently guide you along. Who knows what you’ll uncover in these uncertain opening hours?
Exploring new locations will earn you Knowledge points, as will getting to know the local flora and fauna. Alongside your ever-expanding map, you’ll also be keeping a bestiary, making notes on every monster and creature you fight to understand their strengths and weaknesses better. You’ll also find plenty of natural resources you can harvest and use for crafting. And all of this will earn you Knowledge points as well, which can then be spent on Talents to improve your various combat skills.
The world you explore when you first start Fractured Online won’t be the same in a few months, however. The three worlds that you can roam around will change and evolve over time and because of the actions of the other players. When you return to a world after a few weeks exploring elsewhere, you could find it a vastly different place to what you experienced the first time around.
Swords are also power
What do you do with all this newfound knowledge? Well, there are plenty of enemies out in the world – both in PvE and PvP – and Fractured Online has a combat system that relies more on skill and deft movements than simply having the best gear at the time.
Instead of the usual click-until-dead MMORPG combat, here you’ll be engaging in battles with a system inspired by action RPGs, where timing, dodging, and aiming will be just as important as the power level of the weapon in your hands. And you can beef up all of these attacks using the knowledge points you’ll earn just from exploring the world – and taking down the creatures in it, of course.
Indeed, defeating enemies is a great way to improve your combat capabilities because of the abilities that you’ll learn from them. You can’t learn these abilities with your Knowledge Points, and only by defeating certain enemies will you unlock certain abilities. You can check your abilities menu at any time to see which skills you’ll gain, before setting off into the world to learn them. And once you’ve learned an ability, all you need to do is have a Rest and add it to your hotbar for use in combat.
There is also PvP combat, of course, but how much you do depends on the race of your character. There are three races to choose from, each with different alignments – the Wildfolk are all Good, and the Demons are all Evil, but Humans can choose their own alignment through their actions, being either Good, Evil, or Neutral depending on their actions.
Your alignment affects who else you can fight – Good characters can only initiate combat with Evil characters, while Neutral characters can fight fellow Neutrals and Evil characters, and Evil characters can attack everyone. If you’re looking for lots of PvP, a Demon character will be right up your street – or you can be a Wildfolk character and focus on the elements of Fractured Online that aren’t as combat focused.
As you can see, there’s a lot that Fractured Online is doing differently from the typical MMORPG. From the evolving open-world to the action-heavy combat, this is a game that is full of surprises for even the most ardent MMO fans. And we’ve not even touched on things like Guilds, where you and your friends can join together to take on even bigger enemies, or city building, where a group of settlers can create their own city and grow it by harvesting resources and trading with other cities across the world.
Ready to discover your destiny? Head to the Fractured Online website to learn more about the game, and maybe even pick up a Founder’s Pack if you can’t wait to play it.