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Corepunk Alpha 3 Preview: Promising Combat Hampered by Flawed Balance and Quest Mechanics

Sam Plaisance Posted:
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With so many MMORPGs on the market, it’s difficult to find the right fit, but Corepunk is aiming to compete for your attention. Competing alongside games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV isn’t easy, and development must be spot on to create engaging and thrilling content to bring a new fan base to the title. Does Corepunk achieve what it sets out to do?

Corepunk, still very deep in development as this is the third Alpha test for the title, misses the mark. During my preview, at times I felt helpless and lost, traversing the twisting and turning terrain with almost no sense of direction. With that said, there are a few things the developers at Artificial Core do right, so let’s discuss the great, the bad, and the ugly. 

Questing and Exploration

After playing MMORPGs like Tera, Rift, Aion, and several other indie-developed titles, my impressions don’t solely compare Corepunk against the current massive titles that have kept players enthralled for decades. The vast MMORPG information locked into my brain makes it a bit easier to understand how certain systems should function and what makes a good MMO. 

One of the major marks missed in Corepunk is the questing system, as it gives the bare minimum of information, with some comedy and cuss words thrown in as a bit of filler text. Yes, this is meant to feel like an old-school MMORPG, but that doesn’t mean that I need to run around for 45 minutes looking for wheat or an NPC that the objective gave me no direction to find. 

Another issue with questing seems to be the spawn rate on the items the NPCs ask you to find. During the Alpha, there were a plethora of people hunting down wheat seeds and throwing obscenities in chat at other players who kept running up and taking their loot before they could. 

I believe the reason that a lot of this chaos ensued was due to the spawn rate. I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off for around 30 minutes looking for this wheat for a quest. I went back and forth over the same areas several times, noticing that the seeds had respawned in areas I had already passed through. No, spawn rates shouldn’t be a half second, but when you have so many people trying to test the game out at once, maybe you shouldn’t allow quest items to take over 5 minutes to show back up. 

If there was some form of direction to follow, say a circle on the map that shows you where wheat seeds may show up, the guesswork and respawn times might not matter as much. Instead, I assumed I was just going into the wrong areas and not looking in the correct places and kept running into higher-level mobs that clapped me quickly due to lack of attacks and gear.

That leads me to the exploration side of things, which honestly was a lot of fun. Though I did randomly wander into a camp of mutated-looking rats that two-shot me quite a few times, it is a lot of fun to take in the sights and see what the world of Corepunk has to offer. Exploration felt nice, as the world is quite vast, and it didn’t feel empty or as if it lacked points of interest. There are a lot of things to find and loot, such as chests and barrels filled with goodies, as well as several NPCs wandering the wilderness that I stumbled into by chance and got quests from. 

Abilities and Combat

From my very limited experience playing Corepunk, I did notice something that I liked about the combat and a few that fell short for me as well. The combat feels a bit clunky as if things aren’t quite right in terms of the cast time of the player and the cast time of the enemy. I felt that by the time I used my one and only ability, being only level two, the enemy had already hit me three or four times. I died several times trying to understand the combat, as the timing feels slightly off, making it difficult to damage a rat before it can damage you.

As for what I enjoyed in terms of fighting and combat sequences, I thoroughly enjoyed the animations and the look of the different abilities. They were bright and fun to look at but weren’t overly colorful. They were fun-looking abilities that made combat just a bit more fun. Still, just because it looked neat doesn’t mean it was well-balanced.

Looking Ahead

Corepunk is, of course, still a work in progress, and a lot of the issues I had are easily fixed with balance changes and patches. The point of these tests is to allow players to tell the developers what they think about what is good and what needs improvement. Overall, the title has serious potential as an old-school style MMORPG that brings back difficulty and lack of direction, which to me is a good thing as some titles do a bit too much hand-holding these days, but Corepunk 3 still has a few things that can be tweaked and edited before its full launch.