Citadel: Forged with Fire
Citadel Open Beta Review! Keep in mind this is based on the one-day long open beta! I will do a longer review once the game is in EA!
I planned to make this thread some time ago to help spread the word about the Open Beta test they did, but unfortunately the forums were down and I was busy with work when they came back up. So, hopefully none of you that wanted to play missed it!
Citadel: Forged With Fire a medieval fantasy sandbox game with a massive emphasis on magic. Combat is centered around magic, resource gathering is centered around magic, crafting is centered around magic... The world itself is filled with magic, with plantlife that has an ethereal glow, mythical creatures like dragons flying through the skies and Forest Guardians walking the earth, and mystical pools of mana-infused water.
The game is somewhat set up in the survival style. You start off at one of three starting locations with nothing and have to develop your character by roaming the world, collecting resources, crafting tools, building a home, and fighting for your life.
However, it's not a survival game as it does not offer any sort of hunger or thirst system. The only reserves you have to pay attention to are your health and mana, and outside of combat it isn't difficult to keep these topped up. This, I feel, is a good thing. There's already a medieval fantasy survival game and this means that both can co-exist without being direct competitors (but still be competitors in setting and gameplay). I actually had a lot of fun running around the beautiful world of Citadel without having to worry about having to stop every ten seconds to get stamina, or having to kill for meat constantly, or having to find random pools of water to drink from.
There were some issues I had with it. I felt like the game was too linear for the setting and feel that I believe the developers were trying to go for. For example, all the magic spells and items you can craft are shown in the skill tree. There's no mysticism involved, no experimentation to partake in. For spells, you just level up to a certain point and spend a few skill points. For gear, you just craft over and over until you roll the stats you're looking for. Leveling up is tedious after level 10, consisting of just flying around on your broom to the various caves and enemy camps marked on the map and wipe them fairly easily with what I consider to be (Currently) broken combat.
I consider the combat broken because I've yet to find a challenge when it comes to the combat, except for a few extremely powerful enemies that can one-shot you. As a level 5, so long as I have at least ten of each potion, I have no problem killing camps or caves full of orcs by just standing still and spamming fireball or the first melee spell. Another issue I ran into is how powerful the magic is. When I played Ark on a fresh server, it was a couple of days or so at least (in my experience with fairly normal rates) before you started seeing people with dinos or weaponry that could literally one or two shot other players, so long as the other players had a bare-minimum of armor. In Citadel... Well, after nine hours of the servers being up there appeared to already be some quite highly leveled players who had weapons and spells that would obliterate anyone sub level 15 or 20 in a single shot. This is mostly because, I think, gear quality is locked by level. As a level 15, I can't wear gear that would be appropriate for facing a level 40 with a level 40-locked weapon.
So we might be flinging the same spells at each other, but he has much better potions, has armor that basically makes him immune to me, and a weapon that makes his spells act like my armor doesn't exist. It doesn't make for the best PVP experiences and means that joining an existing server probably won't be the most fun experience unless they tweak combat a lot. Part of the reason is how easy it is to spam spells that do a great deal of damage.
Anyone else have experience with the game?
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