Ragar thinks more pantheons could use a God of Gatling Guns and Flamethrowers.

Earlier this year My.com, the Allods Team and Obsidian Entertainment announced that Skyforge, their upcoming sci-fi MMORPG, was getting ready to start closed beta testing on March 11^th. At the time I hadn’t been following the game, so I was going into it blind. All I knew was that it was sci-fi and there was a guy with a giant gatling gun that transforms into a flamethrower. Since I’m a sucker for anything with a flamethrower (see also Bounty Hunters in Star Wars: The Old Republic), I was interested enough to pay for one of the Founders Packs and get into the closed beta. That was almost a month ago and we’re currently wrapping up the last week of CBT2 testing after a week of downtime following CBT1. So what are my thoughts on the game?

I Don’t Have a God Complex – I Actually Am a God!

For those who haven’t been following Skyforge, let’s start with the setting. Skyforge takes place on the world of Aelion; other worlds are implied during dialogues and on the site, but as far as I’ve experienced in the game and the released material, this is where you’ll be playing. Aelion is named after Aeli, a greater god and protector of the world. At some point in the past, Aeli disappeared and the planet has been under siege by numerous armies of creatures trying to claim Aelion. Many humans fall trying to defend their world from these ravenous hordes. For a select few, they transcend death and become Immortals, able to return time after time to defend the planet and its people.

So what does being Immortal entail in Skyforge? Well aside from serving as an explanation for being able to respawn like we do in every other MMO, it means you have access to powers beyond the realm of mortal man. You can expand your powers using the Ascension Atlas, learning new powers and boosting your raw power. You can look down on the world from your floating citadel and teleport to hotspots of conflict. As you accomplish these tremendous feats, you’ll become worshiped for your work and sacrifices, and this faith will endow you with even greater godlike powers. The most dedicated of Immortals can even push to become a god themselves, granting them even greater powers than before. Nothing like having NPC followers and worshippers to boost the ol’ ego.

Combo or Charge?

All this talk about Immortals and Gods sounds great and all, but this is an MMO and that means there needs to be skills, equipment, progression, etc. Skyforge goes the route of Final Fantasy XIV and The Secret World where one character can conceivably learn everything if they have the time and inkling to do so. Once you get past the tutorial, you’ll be given access to three classes: Cryomancer, Lightbinder and Paladin. Cryomancer is a frost-based ranged DPS with slowing effects and some utility powers. Paladin is your tank option, with melee strikes, shields and various other skills for keeping mobs on him and not the group. Lightbinder is a support class - they not only have a wide variety of attack spells for soloing and contributing to group damage in instances, but also provide buffs and cleanses for party members, debuffs for enemies and absorb shields for the tank and any DPS who happened to get smacked around.

Did you notice that I didn’t list any heals in that quick rundown of the Lightbinder? While most—if not all—of the classes have some ability to absorb damage and a select few can heal back some of the damage they take, there’s no pure healing class in Skyforge. Instead you gain health back through healing orbs, glowing balls of light that pop up while fighting mobs; run over an orb and get back a significant portion of your HP. These healing orbs aren’t instanced – they’re first come, first serve. This means that when you’re in a group, you need to start coordinating who gets which orb and everyone needs to make use of their self-absorb and damage reduction abilities to cut down on healing needed. It all comes back fairly quickly out of combat, but you have to survive that long first.

So how does combat actually work in Skyforge? If you’ve played Neverwinter, the gameplay is very similar. Movement is typical WASD controls with the camera locked to mouse movement. You have some abilities mapped to 1 through 4 on your hotbar as well as Z and C for some classes. Those buttons are for your cooldown abilities, whether survival, DPS cooldowns, utility, etc. Once it’s unlocked, you also have an Ultimate ability bound to R that’s class dependent – for example, Cryomancers create an icy dome that freezes enemies within and deals massive damage, and Paladins leap into the sky and strike the ground at a targeted point for massive damage while cleansing debuffs and boosting their abilities temporarily. The majority of combat is handled through the left- and right-mouse buttons.

For some classes like Cryomancer and Lightbinder these have set actions that vary depending on how you hold down the button: a quick tap for a weak shot on the move or hold it down to add more damage or another effect. For the Paladin and a few other classes, your LMB and RMB attacks become combo moves. For example, RMB by itself is a charged move that deals AoE damage and knocks foes on their feet. If you do LMB followed quickly by RMB however, that RMB instead become a line attack against the target and all targets behind them. Add another LMB before (LMB+LMB+RMB) and that third hit is instead a powerful downward strike. While the classes themselves may not have a large hotbar of abilities, there’s quite a degree of variation in how they’re used between the combo system for some classes and the choice to tap or charge on others. In addition each class has a resource bar that builds with attacks or over time, so there’s also some resource management involved in which combos, cooldowns and charged attacks you’ll use.

Want the Necromancer? Get Ready to Work For It

I’ve only listed three classes so far, but there’s actually nine classes currently in the game. In addition to the previous three, you have Archer, Berserker, Kinetic, Necromancer, Slayer and my personal favorite, the Gunner. These classes are considered more advanced than the other three – they’re the equivalent from a raw power perspective, but for one reason or another they’ve determined that these classes have more complicated gameplay than the other three and need to be unlocked.

On the one hand, I understand the idea of trying to steer new players toward the more novice-friendly options, and having new class options as a goal for progression does make sense for giving the players something to strive for. On the other hand, quite a few players coming into Skyforge will be MMO veterans and in all likelihood they’ll have played some of these archetypes like the Archer and the Necromancer in other games. For some players they really identify with a certain playstyle like Archer and go into every MMO looking for the equivalent. I would have preferred if they went the FFXIV route here: you get one class choice at the beginning from all of the different options. After you’ve made that choice, if you want to play something else, you’ll have to work toward unlocking that class. Regardless of what I may want for a class unlock system, I enjoy the three starting classes enough that I’ll be fine playing Paladin when the game actually launches, so that’s not enough to deter me. For some that might be a dealbreaker though, so I put that out there as a consideration.

Moving back to the unlocks themselves, let’s talk about the Ascension Atlas. As you play the game and complete instances, missions, and so on you’ll start to receive these colored cubes as rewards. Three of these kinds of Sparks are used for the Atlas, which looks very similar to the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X. Each class has their own section of the grid with a progression path connecting the nodes. When a player spends Sparks to unlock a node, they’ll gain either some base stats, a new ability for that class or a talent. Base stats and new abilities are obviously important, but the talents themselves are quite powerful. These are essentially slotable power-ups: you equip them into your small selection of available sockets and they modify your existing powers and change your playstyle. As an example, I have one on my Gunner that gives me a consumable buff whenever I use my LMB attack with the Plasma Rifle that boosts the damage with my RMB charged attack. By slotting this I now need to make sure that I pop off a couple quick LMB shots on a mob before I start dumping my heat into RMB attacks. The further you go into a class-specific Ascension Atlas, the more raw stats you’ll get and the more abilities/talents you’ll pick up for that class.

Some of you are probably looking at that and going “But wait! I really want to level up Archer, not Cryomancer! This is a waste of points!” To some degree: yes, you are spending points that could be going into powering up your preferred class. This has been mitigated somewhat with those stat nodes. Any stat boosting node you unlock is universal – that +10 Might you grabbed from Paladin will still give you +10 Might as a Berserker or Necromancer. There’s also some class-specific Sparks that you’ll get as rewards from killing mobs. These Sparks serve as a wild card for the Ascension Atlas. Let’s say I have a Necromancer node that costs 150 Sparks of Destruction, but I only have 30. If I have 120 Sparks of Darkness, I can spend those with the 30 Destruction and buy the node. This means that if you really want to level up a specific class, but you’re playing another, whether because you haven’t unlock that class yet or because your group really needed you to go Paladin that night, you can save your colored Sparks for that. It’s not a perfect system, though – colored Sparks take top priority, so even if I had 160 Sparks of Darkness for that last example, I’d still have to spend my 30 Destruction before it would let me finish it with Darkness. I’m sure there’s some game design reason they’ve come up with for this like “Oh we still want the player to have to work as their new class to unlock powers instead of just buying them all immediately!” In my opinion, I think letting players spend the class Sparks first is a better system. That may just be me being bitter about how I can’t upgrade my Gunner nodes with Sparks of Progress while I’m saving for Necromancer because it keeps wanting to spend the colored Sparks first. Over the long term this is a minor issue and eventually won’t be a problem, but it’s an annoyance now.

Speaking of class unlocks, let’s talk about the upper tier Ascension Atlas. In the beginning you only have access to the three class-specific Atlases – these three don’t intersect at all. Once you’ve played your class long enough to unlock everything up to their Ultimate ability, you’ll be given access to the upper Atlas. From a zoomed-out view you can see the different class icons surrounded by a sea of nodes to unlock. The stat nodes here are the same as those in the class Atlas, but now you have different center nodes for the clusters. Some of these give perks you can eventually slot once you’ve mastered a class – these passive bonus perks can then be used by any class. There’s a major one that unlocks your god form which grants significant power; I haven’t made it that far on the upper Atlas, so I can’t speak from experience. Finally there’s the nodes for the other classes. These take yet another currency gained by playing the game and once that node is unlocked, you can play that class and gain access to its Atlas. At the current beta stage it takes a significant amount of Sparks to make it this far. Certainly doable, but don’t plan on unlocking another class in the first few hours of the game.

Mighty Ragar, God of Gatling Guns!

Now that I’ve given far more detail about the basic systems than you probably need, let’s talk about my experience actually playing the game. For the majority of my time on Aelion, I was running around as a Gunner, the class that convinced me to drop the $69.99 on a Founders Pack because I’m a sucker for flamethrowers. I’ve actually played with all nine current classes since you can playtest each of them in the Training Room (you even get a new costume for each class module you finish) and while I enjoy the majority of them (Kinetic probably being the weakest for me), Gunner is far and away my favorite. Aside from the aesthetics of just carrying around a giant transforming gatling gun, it has a very unique double resource system and every gun has its purpose.

The gatling gun is primarily for AoE and an all-range weapon – it doesn’t hit hard but it does hit often. Attacking with the gatling gun builds up Heat though and at full Heat, your rate of fire drops significantly. That’s where the plasma rifle mode comes in. Press 1 to flip to the rifle and now you’re a single-target DPS machine; you have some AoE here, but it requires a bit more setup than just sweeping the gatling gun. Using attacks here spends your Heat – no Heat means no more plasma, so it’s back to the gun. On top of all that and your normal cooldowns, you also have an Ammo bar. This slowly fills over time and is used for the mortar launcher, a devastating weapon that fires mines and rockets to decimate the enemy from range. Despite all of that damage potential, this weapon is limited both by the Ammo generation rate (you can’t build this like Heat) and because it requires setup. Flipping to the mortar launcher requires a second or two setup and you have to be stationary the whole time you’re firing; if you need to dash out of the way of an attack, it reverts you to the gatling gun. I’m normally a melee kind of character, but the Gunner just has this appeal to me that the other classes have yet to beat. Admittedly it’s also hard to flip to another class when you’ve put so many resources into unlocking abilities for the first one and it takes so long to unlock more, but the class being fun is certainly the main reason.

So what exactly did I do with the Gunner that was so fun? Skyforge doesn’t have an open world like you’re used to with World of Warcraft and other persistent world MMOs. Aelion operates closer to what Neverwinter and Marvel Heroes provide, with player hubs for trade and social activity, a few open world zones for your traditional “I’m questing around other players and occasionally working alongside them”, and the vast majority of the content being instanced. The open world zones typically have some quest chains that involve going to point A, killing X mobs or picking up Y items, then hitting F for the reward (you can generally complete quests anywhere) and moving on to the next. For the PvE instances these are your more controlled stories, usually with an NPC at the front giving you the setup before you move on to take out all of the bosses. Some of these instances are for 5-player groups (one tank, one support and three DPS), but the vast majority are actually solo instances. You can run these instances with up to a 3-player group if you’ve got a couple friends around and they will scale to the group size, but the majority of the content I’ve seen so far in the game can be done by the solo player. There’s also PvP instances for those players looking to face off against other Immortals, but I haven’t tried their PvP yet and cannot speak of it. I also need to try the 5-player instances at some point, but the solo instances were enough to keep me interested the last month, especially with the secondary objectives.

When you pick an instance to run on the world map, it’ll tell you what the reward is: a specific color of Spark, Credits (regular currency), resources for buying costumes, or a resource for Follower missions - essentially WoW’s Garrison missions/followers but the NPCs worship you and they build temples. Whenever you complete the map, you get a rating based on how well you did. For the first time you complete a mission, I believe it’s just going off time to complete versus the par – the better the time, the more of that resource you get. After that, the game starts throwing these secondary objectives at you. Some are simple like “use your execute move on 15 enemies”, “Find four hidden mastery orbs” or “Dash in combat 20 times”. Others are more difficult like “Don’t die more than three times” or “Loot X of this item that spawns after an enemy dies and is only around for three seconds”. The really tough/obnoxious ones are “Don’t dash more than 16 times in combat the whole map” or Lurking Death; that one involves killing a few monsters that only appear if you get down to critical health, so you run through the map without healing or taking unnecessary hits just to get them to spawn, then you have to kill them without getting finished off. These mission modifiers, even the obnoxious ones, add some variety to each clear of the map and keep the game fresh.

Occasionally you’ll see a map pop up with an x2 or x3 bonus for some resource, encouraging you to run those. Sometimes you’ll see this when PvP needs more people or the game wants to steer you towards newer or harder content. Other times you’ll see an instance that says something like “Archer x2”. If you saw that and hadn’t unlocked Archer yet, you might be somewhat annoyed: “Why do they get all the bonus Sparks?” That’s the thing though – it’s not really a bonus for players with that class. When you select those maps, the game asks if you would like to run as that class or your current one. Even if you haven’t unlocked a class, you can still use them for these bonus missions. The class you get comes with a loadout of abilities and you cannot reslot abilities, talents or weapons, regardless of whether you’ve unlocked others. Besides giving players a chance to try out new classes without paying Sparks for them, this adds yet another difficulty modifier for some maps. Sure you may know how to handle everything as a Gunner, but how will you do as a Paladin or a Necromancer who play completely differently than your class? On the bright side, at least your rings and slot upgrades still work for that new class.

That leads us into our final topic, equipment, stats and Prestige. Your character has two weapon slots (primary/secondary) and four ring slots. That’s it for your equipment – your appearance is completely cosmetic. Your weapons give you Might (primary) and Stamina (secondary), which translates to raw power and health respectively. On green quality or higher, you’ll also see bonuses to some class abilities, forcing you to choose between higher stats and boosted abilities. Your rings won’t have any Might or Stamina on them – instead these are where your secondary and tertiary stats come from.

Each ring comes with two of the secondary stats: Luck, Spirit, Strength and Valor. Strength and Luck are easy to understand – Strength boosts your base damage alongside Might and Luck increases critical damage. Valor gives you more bonus damage, which is a scaling increase to your damage that’s proportional to how much health the target has. Finally there’s Spirit which affects Impulse damage. Over time your character will accumulate Impulse Charges, which are spent whenever certain skills are used. This is your burst damage stat since with the proper skill/talent setup, you can put out some significant DPS even at lower stat levels. If your rings are green quality or higher, you’ll also get one or two tertiary stats on them. These can either tie in directly to those secondary stats (eg Critical %, Accuracy, Temper, Discharge Recovery) or they can be completely separate bonuses like reducing your dash recharge timer or a percentage bonus to HP.

If all of that wasn’t complicated enough for you, now we get to the slot upgrades. Whenever you’ve got gear that you’ve outgrown, you can disassemble it into enhancement stones to upgrade your equipment slots. When you spend enhancement stones and credits to upgrade an equipment slot (primary/secondary/all rings), it adds a multiplier to whatever equipment is currently in there. This bonus is also cross-class, so any slot upgrades you get on Paladin will carry over to Slayer and so on. Eventually you need higher level stones to upgrade further, but since you can combine lower level stones into higher ones, you can always make at least minor progress, regardless of the content you’re running.

All of your equipment, as well as the Ascension Atlas nodes you’ve been unlocking, will also boost your character’s Prestige. In a nutshell this is basically your character’s gearscore. It’s a representation of your character’s raw power, determines access to some instances and serves as a pseudo-level when the game itself has no level system. Considering that everyone uses the same rings and slot upgrades and the stat boosts are universal, the only real variation that you’ll see between your classes is from swapping out weapons and the gain/loss of unlocked abilities/talents. The developers haven’t given a cap value for Prestige yet, so theoretically you can just keep boosting your stats by leveling other classes and grabbing all of the nodes. This does bring up the question of whether they’ll be scaling endgame raids and Invasions based on the average Prestige of the group or if they’ll simply scale you down if you vastly overpower the content.

Conclusion

Skyforge is still in closed beta, but I believe I’ve played enough to give my impressions of the game. I certainly enjoy the combat and progression system – I love that I can always improve my main in some fashion, regardless of what class I’m playing that night. The secondary objectives on all of the missions add variety to the gameplay and keep things more interesting when I’m trying to farm up Sparks for my next node unlock.

However, there are some weak points in the game. The artstyle is great and the zones are very unique, but the textures for some parts of the world could use some work (could be fixed in beta still). I’d also like to see more variety in the NPCs (one of the main plot NPCs shares his face with a number of quest givers). The voice acting is passable at best and laughable at worst. They’ve made some improvements, particularly with properly lip-syncing characters to the dialogue, but it’s still the weakest part of the game. The costume system is great, but it doesn’t seem to extend to weapon appearance and every weapon I’ve found so far has looked the same as the one before. I may love the appearance of my Gunner’s weapon, but the shield for my Paladin set seems weak to me – I’d love to be able to change that to something more fearsome or at least replace it with something more exciting as I get higher Prestige.

So where does Skyforge fall in terms of MMOs? I see it as more of a secondary MMO, similar to Marvel Heroes. It’s built around being able to run content in 15-60 minute chunks of time and the F2P mechanics like the weekly cap on Sparks and other currencies would line up well with using this as your “I need a break from WoW tonight” or “I only have about an hour before dinner/work” kind of game that many subscription MMOs aren’t really built for. Since it’s primarily instanced content, I don’t think it can grab quite as many people as something like WoW or FFXIV can, but I don’t believe that’s their intention.

For me I love having these games to play alongside other games, so I’m looking forward to leveling up my Immortal and becoming a god. The fact that it supports solo and 3-person group play so well is also a major perk since I often find myself online with only one or two friends free to run something. It’s possible that when I see more information on Raids, Invasions and Pantheons that I’ll change my mind on if Skyforge is a primary MMO contender, but for now I’m happy with the game that’s already there.

Michael “Ragar” Branham