Brighter Shores is a new MMO from Andrew Gower, one of the founders of Runescape. The game stands out for all the right reasons. This point-and-click MMO is in Early Access on Steam and instantly calls to mind its spiritual predecessor while establishing its own unique identity through an original episodic approach. After spending approximately 35 hours playing what’s currently available, there is a lot I can say about this title.
The start in Hopeport
You start as newly recruited guards in Hopeport, a bustling port city that acts as the MMO’s opening hub. Brighter Shores has four episodes or areas, giving you a new narrative that expands the profession system. The main gameplay loop involves skill growing, quests, and some monster bashing, but this MMO mixes the formula up with a sandbox-like style of character growth.
You’ll be able to choose between the Cryoknight, the Guardian, and the Hammermage when you create your character. Every class needs certain things for crafting and progressing down a specific class’s path. Unfortunately, the Early Access build has no class-specific combat skills.
Brighter Shores’ most significant achievement is the profession system. It currently has 18 different professions spread across 4 episodes. There is an impressive level of 500 for every profession, which gives a ton of scope for long-term progression. These professions are distinguished from others by their level of attention to detail.
For example, in blacksmithing, instead of just clicking to build stuff, you have many steps to be involved with. You start the furnace, put ore on the furnace one by one, manage the smelting process, refine the ores, and craft items one by one. Every step has its own animation with unique motion. In fishing, like in other forms of gathering, you must actively target and catch most types of fish.
The way the MMO is divided into episodes is a fun twist on the profession system. New professions are limited to each new episode zone. At first, this appears limiting, but it gets deeper as you progress in the system. The stuff you get in earlier episodes comes in handy to craft in later zones, which means there is a connection you will have when you will be able to use everything, while also ensuring the time spent in those previous episodes doesn’t feel wasted.
Gamedesign and combat gameplay
Brighter Shores’s design is a topic of controversy because of its episodic-based combat progression. Each new episode introduces a new fight profession, which feels like a reset of your fight progression along with your gear. While this approach stays true to the episodic format, it has raised a lot of buzz amongst the community. The problem is not so much due to the zone-specific nature of combat professions, but rather the fact that they feel mechanically the same.
Also, the current combat system in Brighter Shores offers the largest scope for future development. While currently in Early Access, most of combat is just auto-attacks the current approach is too plain, making combat more about stats and less about tactics.
Although the combat is mediocre right now, it's worth mentioning that the core gameplay of a game like Brighter Shores lies in its professions (gathering, crafting) and its long-term progression. In other words, despite combat being boring, it's an aspect of Brighter Shores thashould't be easy, as it's far from being the predominant feature of this game.
In fact, you'll invest a little time in setting up the combat profession at the start of each area, then quickly move on to the more interesting activities.
Brighter Shores has a unique approach to pacing that will divide players. In any profession, you will have your initial advancement from levels 1 to 20 at a fair pace with satisfying early achievements. After level 20, the development curve begins to increase faster and takes longer to advance. This design decision creates a stark contrast between players’ experiences in the early and late parts of the game.
While this level of engagement keeps me involved, it could get challenging for players wanting a laid-back experience. This is because just one profession can take hundreds of hours to max level, especially because Brighter Shores doesn't allow you to gather, craft, or kill mobs on autopilot (with the exception of some collectable resources, but which are not very rewarding in terms of experience). To actively level up, a player must manually click on every rock or tree and gather resources.
Even though I personally like it as it brings back life in early maps, the resource-gathering system has some repetitiveness that shows even more when playing for a longer time. As you progress in gathering professions, you go back to the same place for the same resources but with different names. You might start at low levels catching eels at a river, return to the same spot at many levels later for greater eels or its other variants. As resource gathering is taking this “circular” form and slowly progressing to the higher levels, I can see that some players may dislike it in the long run.
Quests design
Brighter Shores’ quest design represents a conscious “regression” from current MMO design, favoring exploration and discovery. Brighter Shores does not tell you where to go as in older MMOs. A quest may just tell you to go “north” to check something out, leaving you to explore, interact with NPCs, and put clues together.
(From reddit)
This should also apply to quest requirements that include profession advancement requirements. Many players don’t finish some of the quests introduced in the first episode because of how high-level you need to be. Hence, a long-term goal. Doing these tough side quests is quite helpful because the rewards involve better item storage and options for traveling, so doing them is meaningful.
It helps that Brighter Shores’ Early Access version is pretty stable, with few bugs or technical issues throughout my more than 30 hours of playtime. It’s also nice to see an incredibly responsive development team that often responds to player feedback on features within days.
Looking ahead, the dev team is planning to add a lot of combat features to existing auto-attacks. They also plan to update trading systems and PvP content later, but they’re not in the current version. Because of this, the current version is able to focus its core systems and develop the professions.
You can play the first two episodes for free, which is a good move. You can discover everything there is to discover in these starting areas before deciding whether or not to subscribe and access the rest of the game for about $6 per month. It gives potential players a real taste of its unique angle before they pay a penny.
The community is one of the strongest assets in Brighter Shores and players interact with one another to cooperate rather than compete. To maintain this positive atmosphere, the developers have taken several steps, including preventing the abusive practice of multiboxing. By focusing on communities, the Fen Research team has made the Steam reviews trend from mixed to mostly positive as players discover the game’s interconnected systems.
Conclusion
Brighter Shores has a vision for what a modern MMO should be like that may resonate strongly with some players, while also possibly alienating others. Players who enjoy crafting systems, strategic advancement, and discovery will find Andrew Gower’s MMO worth checking out despite it being in Early Access. The profession mechanics, stable technical performance, and a responsive developing team show the possibility success in store for future growth, if Brighter Shores can stick its landing in future updates
Nonetheless, prospective players may have to consider Brighter Shores’s design choices, especially around pace of progression and episodic limitations. If you want instant gratification or action-oriented gameplay, its systems probably won’t hold your attention for long.
Instead, it puts forth a systematic long-term engagement model that rewards patient progression and the systematized explorations of its various systems. The free-to-try strategy for the first few episodes is a great way for players to see if this takes their fancy before they pay for the premium content.
Brighter Shores has the potential to be even more unique and enjoyable as an MMO, thanks to the development getting new and exciting features like combat abilities, trading systems, and episodes. It is likely that the success of it would depend on retaining the community’s unique identity while responding to feedback about divisive features. For the time being, it acts as an intriguing experiment in MMO design that breaks modern conventions in favor of a more classical and steady method of exploring virtual worlds and building up characters.
