I’ve never been one to make very good use of Steam wishlists – or any wishlists, for that matter. I’m weird in that way, I suppose. But I’ve been trying to be a more organized adult by making better use of notes and lists and all that jazz, even though it’s a slow process. And it’s already paid off, as not too long ago when I was first entering my semi-rut of MMO gaming, I went to Steam to search for MMOs to my wishlist – just a big old blanket search. And lo and behold, one of the games I came across was Necesse.
It had a lot of cool features that really caught my attention. First, I thought the graphics looked pretty slick. I’m a huge fan of retro-inspired games, so I was immediately drawn towards it. Of course, I did try some other small retro-styled MMOs in the past, which did not work out so well. Leafling shuttered last year, and Warspear Online was kind of a mess. These games admittedly made me hesitant about Necesse too. But the feature list for Necesse was long, the overall reviews were positive, and mostly I still really wanted to see if Necesse would be fun. So I stuck it in my wishlist as something that I might someday come check out.
Coincidentally, earlier this month Necesse dropped a sizable update focused on graphical improvements. It’s pretty incredible when a small game like this continues to add features, especially many years into early access. And now, thanks to Fair Games’ press preview, I’ve been able to check out the update myself.
Early Necesse is familiar survival gameplay
When you’re first loading up Necesse, you’re presented with a bunch of options for how to start playing. I was looking for some co-op play, so I wasn’t sure whether I needed to host a world or go to multiplayer and find my buddies that way. It took a bit longer than I would’ve liked to get it all squared away and figure out how to play together, but eventually, I determined that players must create their own worlds first because that’s how you start the process to create a character. Once my buddy and I had characters, we were then able to invite each other into a world to play co-op.
In other words, you need to have an existing character before you try to play with anyone. Not a big deal, but it did slow us down for a few moments. Necesse should probably just let you create a character from that lobby menu or even put you through the process right from the start even before the lobby menu.
After that, things were pretty straightforward and familiar to any Minecrafter or general survival enthusiast. Take your axe, knock down some trees, and begin gathering wood and other mats, then go into the menus and start building your first crafting bench and other objects.
There’s also a very light but helpful tutorial in the top left of the screen. It’s very out of the way and even has a little skip button, so if you’d rather go on your own, that’s easily accomplished. For us, it helped guide us to which buttons to click and which objects to build out first.
Another cool feature is that the game includes NPCs that not only act as villagers from Minecraft (in that you can trade and interact with based on their profession) but also will often have quests for you to take. One involved finding a dungeon and collecting some monster loot. This led us toward learning how to find dungeons, which also showed us how big the world map can become.
The worlds are similar to Minecraft in that they are also based on some seed value that is used to procedurally generate the world and the things in it. Something else cool is that the world is more like a bunch of islands arranged in a grid, and the individual islands can have their own biome, meaning that just because this island is all forest-styled, the one just to the north may be snowy. So once you’ve built yourself up enough to venture forth and claim a space as your territory, you can fairly easily choose the biome you want.
Now, I’m not a deep Minecraft expert, so bear with me if I misstate a fact or two. But another feature I found really cool in Necesse that isn’t available in base Minecraft is building up your territory with NPC workers. It reminded me of Farworld Pioneers, which I played briefly, though it didn’t click with me. As you’re building your territory with rooms and farmlands and the like, you can also recruit the different NPCs you meet. For example, a hunter we came across said he’d join our village for some coin and mats. After the NPCs have joined, you can then assign them to different tasks and basically build up a village that runs itself.
We were able to dig into all of this in only a handful of plays. There was also our experience in the dungeon, where we gathered better mats and loot. Overall there was just a lot to do. Yes, it’s a little co-op survival game, but we were nowhere close to lacking things in content to keep us busy.
The real fun is when you join a developed server
As much fun as all that was as a co-op game, the real action comes when you join a server with other players. But be warned that there is definitely a distinct lack of an in-game system to make finding cool servers easy. The multiplayer option is found in the UI where you enter info about a server you already knew or had access to, but it doesn’t offer you the option of joining just any old open servers.
This was kind of a bummer, and I think it would be a real boon to the game if Fair Games allowed players to create and share their servers in the game’s main interface. It would really open up the gameplay options for new players too.
So without that option, I had to turn to Discord. I don’t love needing to rely on Discord for basic game communications, but in the Necesse Discord server I found plenty of invites to other player servers, so I was able to find access to their Necesse servers to hop in and play around.
Here’s where you get a real MMO type of experience with tons of players and activities to play together. When I was watching the promotional videos for Necesse, I saw huge monster battles with hundreds of players. These clearly take place on servers like this. In this server (above), the players had set up a really nice village with condo-style housing and a ton of NPCs to work away at the boring tasks. Pretty cool stuff.
Even though this is Fight or Kite and I’m usually focusing on PvP games, I wasn’t able to get my hands dirty this time. Depending on the server you join or create, however, you can find PvP. But it’s not required at all. I wouldn’t doubt that there’s some PvP-only arena servers somewhere. The game has a lot of options for customizing your server, so it would be possible to build a coliseum and set up a bunch of chests with gear and let players have at it.
Overall, I was really impressed with Necesse. I wish I could comment on the graphical overhaul, but since I didn’t play it before, all I can say is that it looks really good now for the type of game it’s meant to be. If you’re looking for a sort of Super NES-style 2-D survival game to join with potentially a ton of players or even on your own, check it out on Steam.
Every other week, Massively OP’s Sam Kash delivers Fight or Kite, our trip through the state of PvP across the MMORPG industry. Whether he’s sitting in a queue or rolling with the zerg, Sam’s all about the adrenaline rush of a good battle. Because when you boil it down, the whole reason we PvP (other than to pwn noobs) is to have fun fighting a new and unpredictable enemy!
