When I first heard of it, I wasn’t sure that Brighter Shores would be a game I wanted to play, but watching development unfold – and the character with which it did so thanks to lead dev Andrew Gower’s personality – I started to get more and more interested to at least take a peek. Besides, we haven’t really had any game that recaptures the feel and gameplay of an Old School RuneScape in quite some time, so perhaps now is the moment for this kind of title to shine.
I was offered that opportunity to peek with a look at this MMORPG’s closed beta ahead of today’s early access release, and thanks to that press preview I’ve gotten a general measure of things. Overall I’m left very mixed, marveling at Brighter Shores’ personable and truly enjoyable world while pushed away by an absolutely monumental amount of grind.
This piece of the game sees your character as a fledgling guard in the city of Hopeport, where you’re given instructions on several basics like movement, at least a pair of spells, and some standard combat after goblins ransack the streets. The tutorial is largely by-the-numbers, but it does a good job of instructing the player on what to do while having lots of character all on its own. It also has a bit of cheese moments in it as well; for instance, I was able to wait in the barracks for chests to repopulate with money and farm until my eyes glazed over.
Perhaps that should have been the first warning about the amount of grind awaiting me.
As questing and story continued, more features slowly unlocked, such as the ability to attune weapons and armor that I would find. Doing that required a little lengthier quest than I expected as I was required to fix a monument known as the obelisk. This also did a great job of showcasing the title’s general sense of humor, which never got laugh-out-loud funny but at least gave me some good chuckles. The writing in Shores is overall quite snappy and fun, with a bit of dry British wit that invited me into a fun little RPG world.
For the most part I stuck to the primary questing right until a point when I had to get to a cumulative level of 60. As of right now, Shores has five professions that you can level up: one for combat and the rest for crafting and gathering such as foraging, fishing, cooking, and alchemy. Earning levels in those individual professions tally up to an overall character level. I had neglected to do anything beyond combat, which ended up trapping me; I needed to be level 60 total, and I’m level 36 at the time of this writing.
So, how does one level up all of these professions? By doing them, naturally. And there is a pretty obvious path to moving up, as well as a guide to tell you which level of reagents you need to gather and recipe books to instruct you on what you can craft. Being guided is definitely not the problem with Shores’ level progression experience.
What is the problem, then, is the time. Leveling up these various skills takes a great deal of grinding each on-level resource over and over and over again, slowly filling up the XP bar and using or selling what you’ve gained until you can move up the next tier.
This would be fine and even something I could ignore wholesale but for the fact that later quests have hard requirements that are associated with these profession levels. One of the city’s quests requires you to make a level 61 recipe. Another requires you to find a fish that can be gathered only at level 25. And you can’t attempt any of these activities before those levels; if you’re not level 25, you cannot gather that flounder, and screw you for believing otherwise.
That means I literally ran face-first into a brick wall because I didn’t stab fish with a spear enough or cook food constantly as I leveled my combat profession. One of the quests does have an alternate route that lets me progress, but I could not find the right NPC anywhere in the town, and I swear I talked with literally every character in every zone I could. So either this quest is bugged or I just got unlucky (or it’s not accessible yet in this test build).
There is a bit of reprieve in this sheer cliff face of a grind in the form of idle logout activities, kind of like offline leveling. When I got to level 20 in the combat profession, I gained access to yet another bar that filled with every fight. Once I filled that bar, I could use an earned knowledge point to understand how to fight a specific enemy – a street louse, to be specific – which saw my character standing in place and constantly smacking bugs until I told her to stop. This persists after logout, so when I came back in a couple of days, I had earned a couple of levels and a bunch of money. Once again, it’s not quick, but it’s an option that kind of helps.
Let’s talk about that combat. As with any other profession, fighting things at or below your level is the only way to earn that combat profession XP. Combat itself is mostly idle, relying on dice rolls between your character and your opponent, with minimal input beyond deciding which weapon to use, knocking back a potion, or waiting for an immunity spell to very slowly finish casting to effectively flee combat.
So reason would dictate that you’d want to maybe fight even level foes for a little more reward, right? Well, therein lies the problem: Stats and gear and level don’t seem to matter in a fight unless you’re about four to five levels above your foe, and all it takes is two or three bad rolls for what should be an even keel fight to go south. Mercifully, death doesn’t carry a penalty right now, but it’s still deeply frustrating when a game apparently doesn’t care how math works.
Lastly, I should point out that I wasn’t able to really group up for anything. This was a limited closed beta test on a press account, so I barely saw another player save for two times on two separate occasions. Maybe all of this gets better with others, but I can’t say for sure whether that’s true or not.
I would be more willing to brush Brighter Shores off for all of these problems if it weren’t for the fact that this game is so unerringly charming. It’s not a deep and soaring tale, but it’s got so much personality and charm, and the systems generally feel fine. I just can’t get past how I felt so pigeonholed into playing an extremely specific way, forced to level up multiple professions at once or else. I suppose that certainly tracks given Gower’s pedigree and the MMO he’s trying to recreate, and I’m not against playing at Shores’ pace. I just wish it didn’t feel so oppressive and hardwired.
There is so much potential and possibility here for a game that actually harkens back to the right kind of old school MMO from someone who was there to make those games (instead of someone with incorrect memories of this supposed golden age). Yet in my view, some leniency – and better stat and combat calculations – absolutely need to happen before this thing can hit its stride, let alone ask for subscription money to access other zones. Here’s hoping that does indeed change as the game moves through early access.
MOP’s Justin also took a look at the game during the press preview; you can check out his thoughts too!
