First impressions playing Ember Sword Early Access

Introduction

Ember Sword is an upcoming web3 MMORPG that runs on a web browser. Since December last year, an open access playable demo has become available. Some GPUs or browsers have issues with a black screen instead of the game, but it's now possible to get a glimpse of the fundamental game design features and feel.

This style of game is right up my alley, it's one of the types of gameplay I enjoy the most. On top of that, I like the visual aesthetics, and the lore I read thus far seems interesting and engaging. So I was excited to try out the game and see if it lived up to my expectations.

For this article I'll focus on my impressions of the two major aspects of the game that can be tested in the open access version: combat and crafting. I had no contact with the web3 aspects of the game and the most important ones don't seem to be in place yet, anyway. So I won't be going over that.

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Combat mechanics

The combat system feels similar to other action-oriented RPGs, with skill cooldowns, different weapons carrying different skills, and positioning on the map having an important role in playstyle and strategy. In this sense, the game feels quite similar to Guild Wars 2, a game I played for several years in the past.

 

Putting aside the work-in-progress character of this open-access version, there are a few issues with the current system I would like to point out.

Combat requires skillful play - the player needs to pay attention to positioning, use skills in the right order and at the right time, and awareness of the surroundings is important. The enemies do a lot of damage, so damage avoidance is crucial (you can't just stand in place and tank damage for long). They also move around a lot and have their own skills, which adds a deeper level of strategy and demands complete attention from the player and quick reflexes. All of this is great and makes for a challenging and skillful combat experience.

But this kind of skillful combat demands equally good controls, however the current system has a lot of shortcomings for me. At this point I think it's important to make clear that this perspective is informed by my experience as a GW2 player, who was about decent-okayish in PvP and successfully completed many Raids, the most challenging PvE content in the game. Raids require near-optimal damage output, good reflexes to avoid taking unsustainable damage, and awareness of the changing surroundings in settings designed to touch the limits of the cognitive capacity of most people. You need to practice and know the fights really well, and you still can get overwhelmed with all the stuff happening on screen, while at the same time making sure you keep your damage output at high levels. With this in mind, here is a list of the main issues for me:

• It's not possible to select or lock on to a target and attack it - you have to move the mouse and keep clicking precisely where the target is. Ranged mobs in particular move around constantly and the environment often blocks movement and sight. While using melee weapons, the player needs to pan and rotate constantly with the right mouse button while chasing down the enemies that are always changing their position on the map. So while you need to move the mouse around to pan and rotate, you also have to keep it pointing exactly where the target is, otherwise you miss. And you also have to keep closing the distance for your weapon swings to hit the target. I don't think the current controls are well suited to do all of this at the same time. For the controls to work effectively, my perspective is that the right hand should only be selecting targets and moving the camera, while all the combat actions are carried out by the left hand, including basic attacks.

• This also requires an oversized and colorful mouse pointer, which we don't have. Many other games suffer from this predicament as well, which makes it commonplace for players to install dedicated mouse applications to make sure the mouse pointer doesn't get lost in all the colorful graphics and animations.

• I find the default controls difficult to use on a computer keyboard and it's not possible to remap keys. The skill shortcuts in particular (mapped around WASD) are not practical at all. It would be much better if the skills could be mapped to the number keys instead. The overall feeling is that the character would be easier to control during fights with a console-style controller. A viable alternative would be a gaming mouse with thumb buttons, but the skill keys are so close to the movement keys that it is still very easy to miss-click and activate a skill instead of moving the character. The exception for this is of course thumb buttons on the side of the mouse, but engaging with those is not as disruptive as trying to keep the mouse pointer on target at all times while having to rotate the camera / adjust the perspective at the same time.

• While positioning is important, there is no reliable way to dodge, there is just a dash skill with a long cooldown. It's probably possible to strafe with the character movements, but I find it hard to coordinate with mouse movements on the right hand. The combat experience with the current mob behavior would benefit immensely from a quick recharge dodge skill like GW2.

• The staff skills (at least the first ones) feel weaker compared to melee combat. The fact that we have to aim with the mouse and the mobs move around so much makes the miss rate incredibly high and a frustrating experience. I think the ability to select targets and target lock would help immensely with the combat experience while using ranged weapons (even more so than with melee weapons).

• I couldn't find potion slots or shortcuts to use healing potions. If they are implemented, the current interface doesn't make it intuitive to find them. The pacing is off, with large gaps between combat while the character very slowly recovers HP. Healing potions take too much time to gather materials and craft, so they are not really a practical option to close the gap. A player needs to spend time in between fights to recover HP by collecting materials in the surrounding area, which may be okay for a change of pace but does not make for effective use of time.

• On the topic of time, the personal inventory is very small, requiring frequent trips to town to refine and store materials, which also breaks the pace and makes the player waste time just moving around unnecessarily. Adding crafted inventory bags would help with this situation quite nicely.

The main conclusion here is while I enjoy and appreciate this kind of action-oriented combat, the controls currently available are not good enough to provide an efficient and satisfying experience.

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Crafting system

The crafting leveling system is interesting but extremely repetitive and wasteful. The leveling loop consists of gathering resources, refining them, crafting items, selling them to a vending machine to recover inventory space for an irrelevant amount of in-game currency - and start over. Once you have your first new pair of gear for a certain slot or a new weapon, you don't need any more, but you have to continue making more of the same over and over until your crafting skill levels up several times and you unlock other or better items to craft.

The fact that the items are all the same - there are no quality levels, no stat range, and nothing to chase with subsequent crafts - just makes the crafting experience feel very uninteresting. It's just a boring thing you have to do to gain XP until you can unlock crafting something better. There are a few options with different stats but very few decisions to be made.

This creates a very boring and repetitive loop where the craftables are essentially trash to throw away once done. After so many decades of computer games and MMOs, one would expect that these crafting game loops would come with more sophistication to them by now, where the journey towards higher crafting proficiency would include the fun and excitement of trying to craft increasingly better and useful items every time.

If I have to craft multiple pants or swords to hone my craft, I would like for every item to have the potential to be better than the one I'm already using or the possibility of selling them to other people, or some other sink mechanism that recycles the items into something else of value - instead of dumping them into a vending machine for a worthless amount of currency or simply dropping them on the ground.

Also, It would be better if the craftable locked items (disabled due to low crafting level) would still be inspectable, instead of a black shape with no information, as you can see in the screenshot above.

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Final thoughts

Although the game clearly has potential and follows combat principles that I enjoy, it suffers from the same problem as almost every other web3 game out there: it feels like a worse version of other mature games with better mechanics, more polishing and more sophisticated solutions to gameplay loops, only with web3 ownership added in the mix.

I think we'd be in a better place regarding ownership in gaming if existing web2 games would just plugin web3 asset ownership. It feels like just because players have ownership of their assets they would be okay with playing less polished, cruder versions of other well-established games.

There is still a long way to go for Ember Sword to become a mature game, but if the fundamentals are not fun or do not work, adding content will not compensate for shortcomings in core game loops in the long run.

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