Choose My Adventure: Leaving the tutorial island and gaining knowledge in Fractured

So that didn’t take me too long, but then I suppose I had done most of the work beforehand anyway: My time in Fractured Online for this week’s edition of Choose My Adventure saw me chase those knowledge points, ultimately clearing out the entire tutorial island ledger and heading my way into the full sandbox proper.

This happened through just a little bit of monster zone farming, which did not take me too long for my first targets, the human bandits camped to the north of the island’s main town. I had already gotten a few of these enemies taken down earlier while I was completing one of the tutorial quests, so by the time I had to go back here, I was all but a few specific kills away from getting 100% of the enemy knowledge I was told to chase.

Before I wrapped that up, I decided to do a bit of a pause in order to process the myriad raw materials that were clogging up my inventory, which ended up being pretty beneficial since I had amassed more than enough hide to create some medium-weight hide armor for my character as opposed to the lightweight commoner’s clothes I’d been wearing to this point.

Once that was finished up, it was time to head back southeast in order to take down several undead targets. It was here that things got pretty tense, starting off with a sudden lesson: Armor type determines the spells I could cast, not just weapon type. And I learned this only because the mage armor spell I had been relying on to this point suddenly didn’t work.

Luckily, the enemies in this graveyard of zombies, skeletons, and spiders ended up being a reasonably even challenge despite that setback, as my hide armor seemed to be doing a good job of protecting me from the attacks. Paired with a few additional spells that I was wielding, I was on my way to slowly clawing through the horde of foes in order to fill out my knowledge book.

It’s at this point that I sort of fell into a slight rhythm in Fractured. This point of the game basically turned the MMORPG into a semi-mindless grinder where my only objective was to wander around this area and be a murderhobo. It also got me to learn something of a rotation for my selected abilities, or at least an order of priority for what buttons to hit at what ranges. It didn’t always go perfectly, of course, and I think there may be a couple of places where there can be some improvement, but at this point things continued feeling comfortable.

Of course, comfort is when a lack of forethought can creep in, and by the time I had gotten my last couple of kills, I ended up in a deep part of the graveyard and at a point when enemies were respawning around me. For the most part, I was giving a pretty good accounting of myself and was able to take down far more enemies than I expected, but the lack of a healing ability for myself and sheer numbers started to tell. It was time to run.

Here’s where the wheels came off. Partially because enemies were still respawned ahead of me, partially because they all have extremely long aggro leashes, but mostly because click-to-move controls saw me doing things that I never wanted to do – and would not have done were I given WASD command of my character. So I pathfinded my way into a small bunch of rocks. I looted a corpse when I was trying to run.

I died.

Being a tutorial island I simply just had to lie there on the ground, wait for a timer to count down, then get back up with all of my stuff intact, all while a UI window wagged its finger at me and said that death outside of the area would be more punishing. After 30 long seconds, I got up, fought my way out of the trap I had stupidly click-walked my way in to, got on my horse, and got the hell out of there. It was annoying, but at least now I know to be a bit more vigilant.

The last task I took on was to kill a boss monster wolf in the forest area to the southwest. By this point my killing of undead granted me the ability to summon a skeletal archer for myself, which is precisely what I ended up doing in order to take on this fight. I assume that this giant wolf boss was meant to be weaker than the giant spider boss I took on while in the graveyard, but in both cases, they got melted in rather short order. The archer certainly seemed to help with the wolf boss, though.

By this point, the tutorial basically told me to click on the star portal and make my way to the next planet in order to “begin the adventure” for my Elksson, and that’s just what I did. I was pretty sure I told the game to take me to a city in Arboreus, but the instructions I saw in my quest log said I was to “explore Terra.” So I don’t know whether I misclicked or if the devs haven’t actually updated that text. But either way, I was in a new – and much larger – realm.

This would be the moment in my playthrough when the training wheels came off. However, unlike in other sandbox MMORPGs – and the tutorial Fractured had previously – I actually felt pretty well equipped in order to take on the wider world and explore. So that’s just what I did; I ignored the quest journal’s gentle guidance, opened the map, went to a nearby combat zone, and started slaughtering lizard people.

Once again, things were falling into a comfortable grind pattern as I sought monster knowledge to fill my book and unlock new skills, but this definitely seemed to be taking longer. I assume the tutorial island knowledge earnings were ramped up pretty significantly in order to get folks off of tutorial island with speed, but the rate of knowledge XP didn’t feel quite so bad. Furthermore, I was able to increase my magical power by petting a big glowy rock and enemy HP pools were enough that I started to try and play around with my build and rotation more. I’ve since basically turned into a DoT monster with lightning and poison skills, paired with my skeletal archer and swapping between staff and knife for ranged and melee attacks respectively.

So since the world is kind of my oyster now, I think we’ve got at least one more week of this game to get through together, particularly since things are a bit more open. That said I am going to point out that this week’s poll choices are basically the same as last week’s, only with a little bit of variation. Still, some guidance is appreciated.

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Additionally, since I did say that this is the final time we’ll be doing Fractured Online things for this column, it’s also time to determine what our next game will be going into September. Here’s what I’m looking at.

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Polls will close at the usual 1:00 p.m. EDT time on Friday, August 30th. It looks like this one’s almost done, and while I feel like I’ve got some final thoughts on my time here in Fractured, I’ll wait to see how polling shakes down before I pull it all together.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.