Here’s one I’ve had on my radar for a little bit: Project F4E. Well, apparently it’s been officially named as Vaultbreakers, but I didn’t hate the name Project F4E. I can’t exactly say why since the Project Whatever naming scheme is a bit overdone and kind of funny how often the name sticks and becomes the official name. I suppose when you’ve internally been referring to your game as Project Whatever for so many years, it becomes difficult to later on say, “This is no longer Project Whatever. We’re now all playing Whatever: What of the Ever. Also we don’t say MMO.”
It’s a fantasy extraction RPG – which is becoming a thing evidently. This one is much more high-fantasy than Dark and Darker Mobile or Dungeonborne. It has a bit more of a MOBA feel than those as well, since the camera sits at that sort of isometric point of view. In DNDM and Dungeonborne, you feel more like a medieval warrior entering a dank dungeon and trying to find your way out. Here, I get a bit more of a World of Warcraft vibe.
Vaultbreakers opened up a playtest at the beginning of the month, and lucky for us all, I got a chance to get down and dirty. Well, mostly just dirty. I hopped in and played for about 5 minutes before I got dusted and absolutely ragequit on the spot. It was a playtest, so I guess that’s OK? No, it’s not really. Fortunately, though, the game was still up last week, so I decided to give it another shot and this time I came away in a much better place. The gameplay loop is certainly alive and well here.
Vaultbreakers has opted to go the way of the hero in its character selection decision, so rather than being offered up the chance to customize and build your character from scratch, you have a handful of different heroes, each with some unique gameplay choices. It makes sense when there’s a specific balance you want to control for.
Now, even though you cannot pick and choose your skills, each hero does play very different from the next. Each one has four active skills and a passive, not including your basic auto-attack. You can also equip up to three consumables to use during play. The healing potions are obvious, but there are also wards that can offer you some extra functionality as well as other items too.
While you’re mostly handcuffed into the given skills, you do have some customizing options when it comes to Perks. These appear to be passive abilities that offer you some vertical progression. Every time you level, you’ll unlock a new one, with the option to equip up to four at a time. Every five levels, up to 15, you’ll unlock a Perk. Now, until you unlock them, they’re hidden, so I can’t say for certain what all of their powers were. I had one that provided bonus armor versus NPC minions, but I can’t recall the other ones I got. I figure they’re all in this genre where they let you specialize a little bit.
Similar to Perks are the Artifacts that provide passive bonuses for your hero. The main difference between these and Perks was that the former type has multiple tiers to level up as you spend some of the crafting materials you’ve collected and escaped the dungeon with. It primarily seemed to be another avenue of progression.
Vaultbreakers also has a bunch of MMO-style quests, like gathering a set of materials and visiting locations in the world. Finally, Challenges are the final carrot on the stick for advancement. I’m an avid achievement-hunter, so having this set of Challenges really gave me something to aim for each time I played.
In Vaultbreakers, you play through the basic loop of an extraction shooter or RPG. You select the map you want to compete in, get dropped in somewhere randomly, and kill and loot mobs until you’re satisfied and choose to find an extraction point. If you survive the whole way, you get to keep the loot you collected. If you die, then you drop the gear and items you had but are given some mercy in that you can keep half of the materials and XP you gained – at least in the first map I was playing in.
Of course, you aren’t just fighting off NPCs in Vaultbreakers, either. You’re also up against other players who are going through the same routine as you. Wouldn’t it be a shame if I had to run around and collect all that loot myself? Wouldn’t it be much easier to simply let other people do all the running around and I just take their stuff? Yes and no. For some reason, other players mostly do not give you their loot. So it becomes a kill-or-be-killed situation. In my case, I ran about a 50/50.
One feature that I thought was rather clever was the way the game dims the screen when you are interacting with something. Whether I was looting a chest, mining a node, or opening a door, the screen would dim so that only a small area around your hero was visible. It’s a fun way to portray the fact that you’re busy messing with something and you wouldn’t be able to see someone sneaking up on you. A very cool concept.
Another important thing done right is that enemies don’t disappear after death. They’ll stay on the ground where they died – so right away you’ll know whether someone’s already moved through this area or not.
My main gripe with Vaultbreakers isn’t isolated to just Vaultbreakers; it’s pervasive throughout every single one of these extraction games I’ve played so far. The combat is just so slow. Fighting NPCs is boring as all get out. I just want it to be over. But at least here it isn’t as cheeseball as Dungeonborne. When I played that, I recall using a doorway to move back and forth while swinging to kill a few knights and skeletons. It was so bad.
Vaultbreakers skills and actions at least activate fluidly, so it has that as a nice bonus over the others. But according to the NPCs and some of the tooltips, almost every attack can be avoided. I took this to mean that there’s a dodge skill or a block for reacting to enemies attacks, but it doesn’t really work that way. Instead, every hero does have a single skill that can act as a block or immunity – but it’s not a traditional dodge.
What it really means is that combat is pretty slow and attacks are typically telegraphed well. Which is good! But not having more skilled reaction abilities means that you just walk in little circles while you’re fighting so that you don’t stand in the fire. It’s not exactly my definition of high-octane combat. Give me some active counters and blocks!
Games like Hollow Knight and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown are single-player metroidvanias, but they offer incredible opportunities for skilled play. Most of these extraction games I’ve played offer incredible opportunities to watch yourself walk in a circle and then walk back and attack. Walk forward and attack. Walk away. Now go back. I don’t know. I don’t quite get the appeal.
I also suspect that the hero skills were not all created equal. I could accomplish next to nothing as a solo player with melee skills. Since there isn’t really any passive healing, every bit of damage you take makes you that much less likely to escape an encounter with another player. With melee, you obviously have to get right up in the enemy’s face, but without an active dodge or block, you just need to time your swing with walking away from the enemy attack at the right moment. If not, you’ll just get chipped away until you’re dead. Playing a ranged fighter significantly improved my survivability.
I do want to add a little asterisk to my experience in that I was playing solo and this game does offer the option to party up to three players, so maybe combat gets better with a team. There were absolutely some classic MMO type abilities, like taunts and so forth. That’s exactly what you want in a team comp, but it’s pretty worthless as a solo player. One of the heroes also had some support skills, but they outright did not seem wise to play solo. That’s where I’d like to have some skill-swapping or ability to buildcraft. I absolutely love buildcrafting, but it’s kind of non-existent here.
Overall, I thought there were some gems buried in this game, moments that made me think that it could be genuinely fun. But then something else would happen that just turned that right back around. I just didn’t really like the combat. I typically love melee over ranged, but I didn’t think it worked here well.
However, I’ll say if you’re someone who likes the extraction genre, then it might be one of the better ones out there for you. I absolutely felt like the gameplay loop itself – at least what it’s trying to do – was there in this test phase. I could get in, run around and loot, and get out. And the dimming screen was very good.
So I’m not going to completely write this one off yet. Vaultbreakers is still in active development, and BetaDwarf isn’t pretending otherwise. In fact, as I was writing this, I wanted to log in to grab some more screenshots, only to find they took the playtest down for more development. In other words, I expect the game to continue to improve as it treks on through testing.
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!
