Archmage Rises

All we get is occasional blog posts with random dev musings and ramblings, but very little substance when it comes to this particular projects. There has not been an actual substantial GAMEPLAY update in ages. Avoid for now.

So, returned to this game after six months hoping it would have been developed a lot further. Unforunately, it has not. I can see the potential, but if a game has not reached a full playable version after 11 years of development, one cannot but wonder. Movement on the map (and in dungeons) is bugged - some hexes cannot be entered from a certain direction. In dungeons all of a sudden mevement trhough WASD stops working. Sometimes afteran event, the screen turns black (the edges with the interface remain) and only leaving and reloading will make it playable again. For no reason the popups will suddenly stop - they seem to flash but are unreadable. All in all, this game once again has shown that 'early access' is not for me. Also, given the roadmap that is stuck in 2023, it seems like abandonware. From what I read, the development tema has now been reduced to one man. I have serious doubts this will even become a full game worth playing. A pitty.

Great game. Positive: -Lots to do with many quests, conversations, building, dungeons, world map exploration, etc. -Hard to stop playing....one more dungeon. -Good music and fun graphics -All of the game mechanics are tight, easy to pick up and work well together. -Even when the combat seems a for sure thing you stay on edge as it's permadeath! Negative: (it's a WIP) -Combat is samey. Once you know the order of attacks to do all combinations of goblins, wolves, spiders, and crocs down down easy. Also more enemy variety is needed. -Quests are bit mundane and there are too many boring steps before going out to look for them. You have to get quest, then ask them about that item, then ask them where it is, the stumble around in that area until you find the marker. -Music can get under your skin as it repeats none stop (village!). -All the dungeons looks the same. One tileset so far. Needs WAY more variety. Why would wolves be in a castle/keep - though it is described as a cave on world map. Overall a lot of fun and great for the price. Look forward to more content/variety!

Start game, make a character with lengthy customization. Once in game I enter town and game crashes. Ok, so character is now gone so do a quick character. I do not enter town and wander around. There's nothing, just tiles and towns. No enemies and no dungeons. Go to town and take a quest. Sure I can get your 4 honey, where do I get them? Oh, in the forest 8 miles from here. Go 8 tiles over and nothing. No prompts, no gather options. Go to town and get a different quest. I need to go to this town. Go to that town, they say I need to go to another town to find a witch. Go to that town. They know where the witch is but I need to repair someone's house? Says I need stone. I make sure I have a hammer and pick axe and go 12 miles west and there's no prompt no options. I don't know what I'm doing wrong here. This is boring.

The idea is something that we want, play the adventurer mage arise to power in freshly generated world, either rise to power or die trying, BUT the implementation is meh... in 1st hour of game the combat factually consists of deciding which magic school you want to level up and spamming that schools basic mana bolt at everything, there is little enemy variety, the only strategic decision is which to take out first & once in 10 turns using interrupt on multi-turn attack against you, not because that really changes much, but just cause you spent so much time to unlock it. Combat (and magic that is core of it) needs hell of a lot of more depth, it gets boring extra fast. UI needs a lot of work, UX is ♥♥♥♥, clicking on miniature icons. The overall game... there quickly comes realization that there isn't really anything to look forward towards, stronger type of mana-bolt unlocks (larger numbers to defeat monsters with larger numbers)... no. Potentially doubling down on the open/generated world idea could work, but there needs to be interesting content on the horizon to get new player hooked.

Until things change I cannot recommend anyone to buy the game. With the old map generation things were different, you would be able to search each tile if it had something there (Either for tracks or resources) and if you passed the skill check you were able to either follow the tracks or collect the resource. Now instead you must find enemies through the new event system which is ok, collecting resources on the other hand is borderline impossible. There is no way to figure out if a tile has a resource on it, and asking npc's isn't much of a help either because when you get the place they said to go to nothing happens. And lets say hypothetically you reload a game to a previous state before you found a resource, now it is gone, like it never existed, even if you walk all over the tile. This either needs to change or we need a tutorial that explains how this new system works because I am banging my head against a wall.

I love the potential for this game, and I'm also a sucker for aggressively open world settings. At the time of writing, there are definitely issues. The thumbs up is for what I hope this will be in the coming years.

well it's not the worst game i tried over the years... there is some potential there. or more correctly there was some potential there at some point. i think some of the existing systems are actually okay. but after all the years of work, the ui and actually nearly all of the interface elements unravel before your eyes. i think i took it like a champ and chewed through for 20 hours. it feels as already im reaching the end of what this game has to offer. i could chew through even more dungeons, build a tower in every city but it gets really hollow really fast because there isnt anything more to come. these concepts are still so barebones, and even what is there is incredibly broken. after i got nearly all spells in my list now the ui starts breaking even more under the strain of scrolling through the list and i just cant take it anymore. it broke me. im actually surprised how much it came close to what i was expecting. its not a game. more like an idea of a game with differrent systems loosly attached to it but not really interlinking. all coated in not beautiful but not really ugly makeup, but the makeup taints everything else because the body or better skeleton of the game is just not strong enough. maybe the body needed more nutrition and less makeup? i dont know where it went wrong but i feel the systems where changed to often and at the same time not enough time was spend on the basics. somehow every system feels underdeveloped. Still i don't hate it. i sometimes have a facination with barely working techdemos. but recommend it i cannot. after all these years i just dont see how you could wrap this up to be half decent.

I've seen the sheer passion the dev has for this game, and I can't wait to see that passion manifest physically as this game develops. A lot of people have criticized it for what it is now but fail to consider what it may one day be. Archmage seems like a bottle of wine that's just been pressed and left in the cellar. I think once we pop the cork in a few years we'll be quite impressed with the taste.

I like what they're trying to do here, Archmage Rises is looking for the level of open-ended emergence to be found in the finest of sandboxes. And that's totally my jam. That said, it's a mishmash of scrapped and reimplemented systems right now. I looked at footage from what they had two years ago. It honestly looked deeper and more interesting than what I played now. You used to be able to freely explore hexes on the overmap. You used to have to choose which spell is most appropriate to defeat which enemy in combat because there were multiple avenues of attack (physical / magic) and visible elemental resistances on everything - not anymore. There used to be branching spell progression (albeit, not much), not anymore. And so on, they've taken a lot of this back to the drawing board. I like that they're putting that much work into Archmage Rises, but I don't like it when depth is left on the cutting room floor. I'm a big proponent of the, "Games are a series of interesting decisions" approach to game design. And these half-implemented systems would appear to me to have most of those decisions already made for the player: [list][*]I get that we're a gifted aspiring Archmage, but why is there zero consequence to casting spells? No fatigue or other cost outside of a few spells on the overmap and you can just nap those off (or not and roll saving throw vs heart attack - yes, I'm serious). For the most part, using magic is all upside for no downside, every opportunity to cast a spell is a chance to raise your spell school experience. But how much more interesting of a decision it would be if magic use had a downside, or at least was capped to a rising ceiling of aptitude, a rocky and perilous road to magical mastery. [*]In combat, I Mage hand anyone with a charging attack to interrupt them, otherwise do as much damage to the most dangerous enemy. That's not an interesting decision because it's all reaction and no decision. I have a bunch of spells but I don't need any but a few favorites, there's no circumstance that requires I think on my feet in combat. The way they handle protection is pretty bland, they just lump all your armor into one pool that gets whittled down and at that point you run. These aren't interesting decisions. [*]Elder Scrolls-style skill progression is another example of all up to no down. I go to town I exhaust all conversation options because it takes zero in-game time to do and I gain persuasion skill doing it. That's not an interesting decision because it's all gain for no risk or downside. Wandering a dungeon and watching my perception go up feels unearned because I didn't [i]do[/i] anything but enter the room, it didn't cost time, it didn't cost energy, etc. Again, all gain, no risk, no downside, and thus a non-decision. [*]I'm given quests to find materials and ask the townies where it is and get vague instructions. (Nowhere in the game does it even tell us 1 hex = 1 mile, and frankly I'm still not sure that's true.) I get close to the materials and cast the spell that detects materials and find nothing. These aren't interesting decisions because this isn't a game, this is random wandering around. And when I finally stumble on the hex to harvest, I am given a menu where I can choose between the best spell I have for the job or inferior means, not a real choice at all. [*]I have to hold down alt to see the click spots in dungeon. And sometimes it dismisses skill increases I want to see. That's not an interesting decision, that's not even a game mechanic, it's just annoying thing that impacts gameplay flow. [*]I hire a ship for a week. I stay on land for a few hours and the captain gives me a glowstone and tells me to call them again. I use the glowstone and they charge me again to hire the ship. Captain, I already paid you, what's going on here? Oh, I can sell the glowstone and maybe make the captain mad? That's more of an interesting decision than most things on this list. But what if I want to give the glowstone back or have it keep track of how long it's been rented? I can't. Because this is an unfinished system, like all of the above. [/list] That's not to say that there's zero interesting decisions. Because in a game this open, where you can go anywhere and work for anyone, you have a pretty huge amount of decisions available. A few of them are bound to be alright. But given how little care has been spared at balancing the core mechanic, it feels a bit in a broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day sort of good balance. It's also kind of buggy. Quests I've taken won't show on the log. I've got three skill books, I've read one, and sometimes I can get another book to show up as a reading option and sometimes I don't. Text dialogue sometimes has variable triggers in it that have been masked wrong. Etc. Clearly this game has a lot of duct tape holding it together. I've seen much worse early access games, but it's rough. But you might notice I'm still recommending. I really respect what they're trying to do here. Being able to ask any NPC any question? That's pretty big, and [i]usually[/i] works. Having thousands of NPCs going around doing stuff, living lives, adhering to schedules? Also very impressive. Emergent procedural content on nearly every level like a glorious narrative engine onion? I wish every game had that. And besides, I tend to recommend on the scale of, "Would someone likely get as many hours of enjoyment out of this game as they spent dollars?" Sure, I'd say you could find 12 hours of fun here. That said, I really wish they'd put more emphasis on improving the quality of the decisions given to the players in the core mechanics. Maybe it's just a half-finished mess right now. I'll have the opportunity to come back in 1.0 and revise this review accordingly.