I Played 30 Hours of Corepunk (NEW MMO)

hey everyone what's up so today we're going to be taking a look at cor Punk a brand new MMO slated for release in 2024 they recently held an alpha test where the game was playable for a few days during which I sunk somewhere around 30 hours now I intended on trying this game regardless as it's one of the MMOs I've kept tabs on over the years and I'm looking forward to seeing its release but then also the developer artificial core reached out asking to sponsor a video where I share with you an overview of the game but also give my thoughts and impressions they were pretty clearly receptive to both input and feedback so besides going through the basics of what cor Punk is yes I will be sharing my thoughts on the game's current state along with what I think needs Improvement as development continues leading up to release okay so for starters Corp Punk yes as I said is an upcoming top- down MMO RPG what's interesting is it's got a bit of an old school hardcore spin to it if you think of the leveling experience in modern-day MMOs as being handh holdy straightforward streamlined or easy corpu has really gone in the polar opposite direction for better or worse the game just drops you into the world and basically says good luck figure it out on your own there are no map markers for quests that you've collected in fact even the quest descriptions in your log can be vague enough that you best have remembered what the NPC you got it from told you you also better remember where they were located the combat while simple can also be quite difficult if you're not paying close attention to enemy Telegraph and get hit by one or two of their big attacks you can quickly lose most of your health and when you do take too much damage and need to heal well guess what there is zero zero out of combat regeneration the the thing that you're probably accustomed to in most MMOs where when not in combat your health just comes back slowly even if it's at a snail's pace well they don't even give you that luxury no the only way to regenerate health is by drinking a potion eating food or resting at a campfire ideally you will do two or all three of these at once because any one of them alone it takes ages I'm talking multiple minutes to fully fill your health bar and then in general across the board the game's progression is like old school slow you start off only Gathering one resource from everything you harvest there is no fast travel you have to physically walk everywhere and at least in this alpha build getting to level eight took me I think it was 15 hours to to hit level eight that that's the time to progress in this game so yes I said Corp Punk is anything but handh holdy or easy they have very clearly developed a deliberately slow paced methodical challenging and timec consuming game as I said for better or worse they are filling a niche that's not very well represented today and some people are going to absolutely love that but then also these design decisions will definitely push other players away who are more accustomed to many of the conveniences seen in many modern-day MMOs so after playing Corp Punk for a total of roughly 30 hours I I'll say I find myself intrigued by the direction that they are going in while at the same time having a fair few points of personal feedback this is an alpha build so it is certainly not content or feature complete but I do want to give my input based on what was here to help improve the game as the development continues and and try to make it as good as it can possibly be before it comes out so before we go into the uh constructive feedback and criticism portion of the video though I want to run down the basics of the game to give you a pretty clear overview of a lot of the major systems and features that we saw in the alpha so after character creation where you select a class and spec which has consequences a bit more far-reaching than you might be used to and I'll cover that soon we are then dropped into the middle of the woods with a pair of NPCs just in front of us now you would be forgiven for blowing straight past them as the game doesn't give you any obvious indication that they have a quest or at least not the indicators you might come to expect such as an exclamation point or some other thing highlighting a marker above their head no as with most of the rest of this game it's all very hands-off you're just expected to take the time to interact with every NPC to discover if they are a crafting vendor if they have a quest or if they sell items that you might happen to need so speaking with the goblin that was housed inside of a Mech unit I did discover that he happened to have a quest for me he asked me to retrieve these newcomer forms that were on a table by his house his house he said was located somewhere north of here now checking my map for a destination marker revealed that there isn't one in order to find the objective location I needed to have paid attention to the description given by the questgiver and explore through the world now this fact remains true across the board for every other quest in the game they will tell you vaguely what and where your objective is you must then kind of sort out actually finding it on your own so yeah they don't even give you like a explore this region to find the objective of this Quest that they'll just describe the general area when you get the quest and they won't even reiterate that description very well in the quest log after the fact so you got to pay attention when you pick up the quest if you want to find uh where they are with any relative ease so after picking up that initial Quest walking down the path I am given a couple of tutorial popups for movement camera control and how the quest log functions and that's about it for the game's handholding from there on out you are on your own free to explore the world speak with NPCs find Quest objectives gather resources craft and engage in the combat so let's talk about each of these systems starting with the combat while Corp Punk is played from a perspective similar to hacken AR RPGs like a Diablo or Path of Exile the gameplay experience is nothing like those games it is much more akin to that of a character action MOBA sort of like playing the MMO version of like Dota or League of Legends the fundamentals of combat the movement and attacking are nearly nearly identical here so it's got click to move your character will go wherever you click on the ground there is fog of War where you will only see what is in your character's direct field of view and this can and is often obstructed by terrains or buildings you have these predetermined skills based on whatever character and specialization that you picked and many of your attacks and spells are skill shots that you have to aim by positioning your mouse in relation to your character and its Target so how you move how you attack yes these basically have the game playing pretty much identical to a mooba and I'll say for that reason I think combat is actually one of cor Punk's strong suits it's one of the highlights from my play experience it just feels really good to fight things engaging with camps in particular where you can fight anywhere from two to five or sometimes more enemies at a single time sort of becomes a bit of a puzzle you basically have to focus on priority targets Dodge the telegraphed attacks and decide which of your handful of abilities that you have are going to be used when more so than anything though though a really big Focus while in combat is simply on avoiding taking damage because Health Management is a massive deal in this game in fact I would say that a lot of your time will be spent maintaining and refilling your health bar because as mentioned earlier the game does not give you out of combat regeneration although that isn't actually strictly true fact is when you are above 90% health or Mana you do have outof combat regeneration however as soon as you drop below 90% that stops so functionally a majority of the time you will not be regenerating Health you can count on not regenerating Health we found that in all of our play time it was nearly impossible to consistently stay above 90% unless you happen to be fighting a single Enemy At A Time groups of enemies groups of two or more pretty much will always do enough damage to you to drop your health below the 90% threshold which then cuts off the automatic regeneration and that was us playing in a group of two one of which Liam was playing as a dedicated healer if you are running solo you can pretty much expect to never automatically regenerate health because you will always be dropping below that 90% threshold in which case you will be relying on the game's various manual regeneration systems campfires these are pretty much cor Punk's replacement for the automatic outof combat regen resting at a campfire will ever so slowly replenish your health and mana and I mean ever so slowly playing as the tank character if I were at 1 HP we actually calculated resting at a campfire would take nearly 5 minutes of sitting down to regenerate all of my health I'll repeat that I would have to sit at a campfire for five straight real world minutes to regen the health on the character that I was playing now there are other additional means of regeneration and basically the idea is that you're supposed to stack these so next there is food this can either be purchased or most of the time it is going to be crafted and it offers an additional layer of health and Mana regeneration there's a lot of variety here with a ton of different recipes using all sort of different ingredient sources that offer regeneration at different rates for both health and Mana now eating food alone is almost nearly as slow as sitting at a campfire but the key here is that every single campfire comes with a bonus to food regeneration as well so there are campfires that will double the effectiveness of any food that you eat while resting there while also having the basic campfire passive regeneration and there are other fires that have no base regeneration but will then triple the effectiveness of any food that you eat while in at as well so cor Punk appears to have replaced outof combat regeneration with this multi-layered system of campfires food and yes there's also a system of potions that you can buy or craft these are much stronger and come with a lot more healing but also have a long cool down and from what we saw at least in the early game were quite costly it it didn't seem in our first 30 hours that you could just chug potions you will not have enough either you won't find the resources to craft enough or you won't have the gold to afford enough it's really just for emergency use cases it's not for something that you do popping a health potion after every couple of fights a majority of your healing in this game is going to come from sitting at campfires and consuming food ideally doing these two things in conjunction and there's this really interesting interplay between combat and health regeneration because as mentioned the combat can be quite difficult you really even though it's very simple and you only have a few skills you really have to pay attention when you're engaged especially with multiple mobs to dodge those Telegraph attacks to properly combine your auto attacks as well as your skills and then to use use your skills in a proper combination because from what we saw a lot of these skills have a fairly lengthy cooldown where you're only using them once in most fights so how you use them when to interrupt spells to prevent damage from incoming enemies all of that stuff there's like a strategic sort of puzzle element to it but then at the same time you're really trying to avoid taking as much damage as possible because there is such a drawback to taking any damage whatsoever given how difficult it is to gain back Health in this game and it's really its own process now I want to talk a little bit about the character classes and specializations this is another thing that makes Corp Punk really feel more like a MOBA than a traditional MMO so at character creation you pick your class and spec which comes with a predetermined four skills now every single class in the game will have three subclasses when it releases however only one of those was available in the alpha so I wanted to play as the sword and shield class which was the warmonger and they had the legionary subclass available in this test now that subass came with the abilities Shield bash catapult where you could pick up and throw an enemy or Ally there was a spear throw and there was this like super powerful buff that made you immune to CC and regenerated Health called Unstoppable now those four skills were the four skills that I could use the entire time that I played through the alpha and that was it the four skills that I started with you unlock them as you level up but the four skills that my character class the warmonger legionary had when I made my character that was the four skills I had the entire play time there were no other skills ever introduced there were no skill variants there were no other options now as you might know this is a bit different than how many other MMOs work where you pick a class but then have as you're playing the ability to choose different specs and those specs might have a list of skills you can choose from or some games that have weapons that unlock new skills like an ESO or Albi in online or Guild Wars 2 and in many MMOs there's some Choice making while playing where you can mix and match and swap these things around choosing from a suite of skills which ones you want to focus on as part of your core ation or your build or whatever but in corp Punk the subass that you pick when creating a character will determine the exact four abilities you can use while you're playing that character subass now they have said that you will eventually be able to swap subclasses however each of those subclasses has their own level so basically it's like starting a new character from scratch if I am playing My warmonger legionary and I want to swap to one of the other two subclasses it is essentially like going back down to level one and making a brand new character I imagine there is some other progression that will stay with you of course but when it comes to unlocking and progressing those skills and leveling them up you start at one you start all over when swapping sub classes now do keep in mind though that because this is an alpha a lot of this is going to be subject to change including how this system works but the main point stands that the decision of your class and spec or your subass that you make a character creation is looking to be one that you will be stuck with for quite some time now that said there are further in-game systems that will add more variety we do know that there will be a system of skill trees that unlock passive bonuses tailored to different play Styles as well as the artifact system that besides passive bonuses can have active abilities but neither of those were available during the alpha artifacts were available but I didn't see any artifact abilities while I play so I can't really speak to them oh lastly there is visual customization in the game where you can choose like a a variety of face hairstyles along with skin hair and eye color when making a character but I I don't really care much about this yeah you can you can change how they look uh visual appearance wise all right now let's talk a bit about the open world from what we saw the game is completely open world no loading screens with seamless transitions As you move from one zone to the next in the alpha build that we played there were six zones in total there was dust tied Forest this was the starting spawn location where where those two intro NPCs were and you had to walk north of here to get to that first Quest objective and doing that actually dumped you into the second Zone Golden Field Golden Field consists of all these farmlands with fields that have various crop types and then in those fields you'll find different bugs and rats now the one town that was in the alpha was located in the center of this region in it were various NPCs for Quest crafting and vendors along with a storage chest location and a couple of doodads that you can interact with this was also the only place that you could find that one uh constantly active campfire there's actually two of them there was the one with 100% food boost and passive regen and the one with no passive regen that had 200 100% food boost and outside of that town scattered all around the farmlands were several NPC locations points of interest and crafting venders in general you would spend a lot of time in this Alpha just running back and forth through this region as basically everything tied to progression and the crafting system all of these vendors and the resource processing locations were located in this centralized location of goldenfield besides goldenfield to the north there was a skylight grasslands which was a good location for combat and resource farming that's pretty much all that was there there was groups and uh single single enemies and then nodes that you could Harvest from to gather resources for your crafting and then just to the west of goldenfield was Sun weave Glade this was also another good spot for early to mid game combat and resource farming and then far to the west and to the Northwest were two significantly larger higher level zones West Wind woods and wind reach woods now each of these zones were actually roughly the size of the four prior zones combined and in them you would find higher tier resources higher level enemies and this is also where the open world PVP took place although we didn't actually see any PVP encounters ourselves a warning would pop up whenever you entered these regions that full open world PVP was enabled we just never really saw any other players there while we were roaming around now these two zones were basically the end game for this Alpha test as far as I could tell this is where you found the resources needed to craft the highest tier of alpha weapons and artifacts and after going through and completing a majority of the quest we spent most of our time farming here to get said resources to boost up our characters so Gathering and crafting this plays a real Central focus in corp punk you go out into the world harvesting resources many of these will then need to be processed after which you will combine both raw and processed items to craft gear and consumables so the Gathering professions in the game include mining logging herbalism and Butchery which are then used for crafting in the following professions there's construction which it lets you make artifacts that boost your stats of whatever choosing you want for your character weapon smithing where you craft weapons and chips which are stat boost for those weapons there's Alchemy where you make consumables with health and Mana regeneration but also stat boosts and mysticism where you can make runes that add very strong passive Buffs and Trigger effects onto your artifacts so both Gathering and crafting in this game also have their own progression systems known as Mastery you start at level one known as beginner and then through the use of doing any of these Gathering professions or doing any of the crafting you level up making you more efficient as you move from beginner to Advanced and then Advan to master so for gathering this will mean a better yield as a beginner you're only going to be able to harvest an ore or tree or herb one single time before it vanishes but then when you move into advanced each one of those nodes you come across can then be harvested twice before they disappear effectively doubling the resources you have the chance to gather in similar fashion crafting items levels up each of those professions masteries which then let you make better items as well as having a better chance of crafting higher Rarity and higher tier items now this moves us into the gear system so gear is broken up basically into two main components there are weapons and artifacts there are also gear slots for things like Helm chest and gloves but that is 100% cosmetic when we are talking stuff that actually boost your character stats and power that solely comes from the weapons as well as artifacts and then there are a couple of enhancement systems for each of those so weapons will determine your basic attack damage and then the damage that scales off of a lot of your abilities also if you're playing a defensive class that uses a shield you get a defensive Boost from that as well there are a few base level weapons that can be purchased from vendors for every class in the game but all of the best stuff the top tier things those are going to be crafted and then the other and what's probably the largest boost to player power comes from the artifact system so you've got six artifact slots and then from which you will fill those with various artifacts that boost whatever stats you happen to prefer so artifacts will first come with a primary stat this can increase your attack or spell power Health Mana armor resistances or critical chance as well as some secondary stats which do things like uh cooldown reduction buff duration Vision radius increase your area of AFF abilities your CC duration health and Mana regeneration and more as you craft higher level artifacts these can be boosted up you can have multiple primary stats and you'll start getting an Ever growing list of secondary stats as well and then there are additional layers of enhancements that you can place on both your weapons and your artifacts further making them stronger so basically how the game works is after you are dropped in and you're given your first Quest you just go out and explore and essentially do things as you please you'll walk around you'll discover different NPCs they will give you quests you can choose to go do those quests or you can just walk into the Wilderness and start harvesting the more you harvest the better you get the better I get the more items you get and then with those items you will then fuel the crafting system and the more you craft the better the crafting gets you go out you fight some enemies you harvest some resources you do that until your health and Mana go down and then you might revisit town so you can heal at the campfire craft some food that you will use while at the campfire or once you've gathered enough wood you can use that wood to craft campfires on the go but those do seem to be fairly limited as you just don't acquire enough wood at least in this build to be consistently pumping out your own mobile campfires you're going to spend a lot of time coming to base and the whole gameplay Loop is basically this uh being in town crafting healing going out either doing a quest harvesting resources fighting enemies some combination of those things and then once you run out of Health you return to town replenish process your resources turn in your quest heal back up your health and then go back out and do it again back and forth and back and forth and back and forth from our experience that is how this game plays out that is the basic gameplay Loop now as mentioned at the top they said with this video that they were totally receptive to feedback they just wanted us to give our Impressions because they want the game to be better and they want to know what we think about the current state so let's jump into the feedback as mentioned early on this game is very slow paced this encompasses not only character movement and the speed of combat but also the progression systems so for example I got to level eight after around uh I want to say it was like 15 hours of play time that's not really that big of a deal because games vary with Max character level obviously so the number eight doesn't have any particular relevance to the number of hours but I'm not really so concerned about the speed at which leveling is uh progressing I'm more concerned about the pacing and progression of a lot of the other systems so let's talk about Gathering now you start only being able to harvest one item per resource node that you interact with for example if I walk up to a tree I could swing at it and gather some material from it a single time before that tree would disappear as you level up you get higher yield and more chances per per node as we mentioned earlier but for me I didn't reach that point until about 10 hours of playtime it was 10 hours of me harvesting a single resource from every single harvestable resource that I could find the issue with that is that there weren't a lot of harvestable resources even in the more densely populated areas that would would technically have more you could walk for several minutes at a time before you found a new tree to harvest what's more than that though is that there is only a chance at harvesting because for two reasons number one you can fail but then also even if you are successful at harvesting a resource node be it a tree or herbs or skinning an animal every single resource uh node has several potential drops I think at the very least every single resource should almost guarantee getting those base level items especially trees giving wood I could literally spend 20 minutes chopping down trees knock at a single piece of wood and then as such not be able to craft a campfire and have to walk all the way back to town if I want to heal my character at any reasonable Pace because remember just consuming food and even just uh chugging potions isn't going to cut it you need campfires in conjunction with food to have any sort of reliable Health regeneration that's affordable I'll also say I don't really love this failing proc system like if I farm something give me something from it even if it's just a basic thing if anything make the failure the failure to get the additional items but always always give me a piece of wood always give me a piece of or always give me a basic animal hide oh that's the other thing the types of animals that you can skin in the game you won't always be able to skin them there's like a percent chance like when you kill a boar a boar can let you skin it but it won't always let you skin it in our experience it seemed like you would actually get the chance to skin it like 30 to 40% of the time the other 60 or so perc of the time it just wouldn't be skinable like my next point at feedback is pertaining to combat uh so combat is one of the things that I like the most about this game I think they get it really well it feels like a a good playing mooba for example the shame is that it happens so infrequently I do think that mob density could use a bit of a bumping up at least in certain regions of the world even in the more dangerous areas in those Far Western locations with the PVP Flags even those areas felt fairly sparse in terms of the number and density and frequency that you would come across enemies as of now I just think packs of enemies are way too spread apart and there's a lot of downtime running around just trying to find enemies to fight also impacting the frequency of combat is how the Health Management and healing systems work right now I would say especially while solo I would be out of Health after fighting just a few packs of enemies and because even finding the resources to craft the campfires was so difficult for the reasons I mentioned earlier often times this meant yeah I would go out I would fight like three or four groups of enemies and then I'd have to walk all the way back to town and depending on how far out I ventured that could take like 10 or 15 minutes depending on how long it took me in order to to find groups of enemies to to kill and then I would kill a few and then I'd be out of health and I'd have to go back to town because even though I chopped down 20 minutes worth of farming trees I still didn't have enough wood to craft a single basic campfire a lot about the pacing of this stuff and just the general gameplay loop I think needs to be fine-tuned I actually am totally cool with this system of no outof combat regeneration and having us rely on campfires plus food I'm fine with that if I could reliably just make campfires constantly on the go but the fact that I can Harvest trees for 20 or 30 minutes and not make a campfire man it that plus no outof combat regeneration feels really rough also with these static campfires I think there should just be one of these at every major point of interest rather than having to run back to the main town if I was out of self-crafted campfires put a campfire at all of the major Towns at at like every one of the crafting vendors that are scattered around the world or whatever and in general I would like the pacing to be a little better where you wouldn't have to full heal after like two or three packs of enemies because combat is so fun I want to be doing it more often and I want to be sitting at a campfire less often in my ideal World also uh a note of feedback this was an alpha so we don't expect everything to be here but I was surprised by the fact that there were zero open world events anywhere and there weren't anything like Dungeons the open world basically consisted of one flat plane one-dimensional flat location in which you had resource nodes and packs of enemies and then the towns and NPCs no special events no special happenings no areas where you could dive deeper like entering a dungeon or a cave or ruins the open World part of the exploration just felt a little uneventful and flat now I expect there to be a lot more and I know this was just an alpha but I did just want to point out there were zero open world events zero Dynamic things happening and no places to delve deeper no dungeons you could enter no caves you could go in nothing it's just flat terrain packs of enemies with resource nodes all about and walking like that's some that's a bulk of what the open world consists of right right now in this test and some quality of life points of improvement I think quest at the very least should show you the starting NPC that you got the quest from it's fine that it doesn't show you the objective it's fine that we have to Inuit it and figure out where these Quest objectives are located I would like to see where where these return to because of the fact that they don't give you the quest locations sometimes it could take several hours before you complete a quest and a lot of times you'll forget which uh vendor you got that Quest from now they do provide like a vague description of their location but even that isn't always accurate the game has no fast travel and I'm totally fine with that there was a Hearthstone like item in the game but as of now it only returned you to the spawn in location after character creation there from what we saw was no place in town to like sync up your Hearthstone uh that should obviously be fixed because obviously I don't want a hearth to the spawn in location that's like 10 minute a 10-minute walk from the town I want a hearth to the town that clearly is something that should be and I'm assuming will be addressed and we do also know while the game has no fast travel that there will be other modes of uh means of locomotion some sort of vehicles Transport Systems are going to be in the game they just weren't here in this alpha build and one of the last major quality of life points of feedback that I would say is the crafting stations in the starting zone are hilariously spread apart if you get the resources to craft an item you're looking at another 15 or 20 minutes of walking all around that Central Area to get to all of the vendors to process your raw materials into refined materials and then taking those refined materials to the vendors to do the actual crafting just if you have a central Town put all of the crafting vendors in that Central Town don't make me walk around for 20 minutes even though I have all of the resources that's another piece of quality of life feedback that I'd like to see ultimately it really comes down to I think the the the concept of the game is great and I think the fundamentals and polish and gameplay I think a lot of this game is done really well I just think they need to work on the gameplay Loop and the reward systems to make it feel more rewarding it's okay to have a slower pace of progression it's okay to have slower movement speed and slower pace of combat but there need to be rewarding Loops among that and I need to not feel like I'm being punished every time I go out to fight a couple groups of enemies that I have to walk back to town for 10 minutes to sit down for five straight minutes to heal before I can walk back out and fight more three more packs before walking all the way back to town and sitting down for another five straight minutes to heal that reward Loop that gameplay Loop just needs to be improved and I hope they do it because the core foundation of the game the playing of the game is really enjoyable and I like the idea of a slower paced game I just think it needs to be refined a little bit now good news is that since the alpha they've already released a blog post saying that they're taking in some of this early feedback saying that we are still sifting through feedback but we've already identified some key areas to focus on those included the level one to5 gameplay and tutorials looks like they're going to streamline this at least a little bit more for example showing you where the campfire is so you don't go 5 hours without knowing that you can craft your own personal campfires and are constantly running back to town they're going to work on improving the questing adding more quality of life features more content and World exploration increasing the number of players per Shard maybe that's why we never saw anyone when we went into the PVP zones and then also doing things like fix fixing glitchy mobs balance performance and bugs and they wrapped up by saying that we aim to address these issues by the next test which is currently planed to happen sometime at the end of February and based on the results of that test they will determine when the Early Access dates are going to happen and whether more test will be necessary I'll say I'll wrap up this video by saying I do think the core of Corp Punk the base game is solid I do enjoy the slower Pace I just think they need to fine-tune that gameplay Loop it just feels a little too drawn out and a little too unrewarding at the moment but I'm looking forward to seeing more I'm looking forward to see more content variety Beyond just groups of enemies and nodes to harvest in the open world I'm looking forward to seeing the Dungeons and raids we know that those are going to be in the game and I'm looking forward to uh seeing more of the game's progression systems because a lot of that also wasn't included in the alpha in the end I felt like this was a solid Showcase of mechanics and systems but felt a little features and content Laing and am I'm just hoping that that improves with time as as we go through more tests and we get to see more of the game but overall there you go that's a look at Corp Punk that's a an overview of the alpha build generally what was in it and then also my Impressions and feedback for it and that's going to do it for this video thank you so much as always for watching hope you guys enjoyed it I'll see you next time take it easy

Channel: Force Gaming

Views: 167,321

Keywords: corepunk gameplay, corepunk preview, corepunk review, corepunk impressions, corepunk footage, what is corepunk, is corepunk an MMO

Id: IN9LMg5E9Po

Length: 31min 20sec (1880 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2023