Choose My Adventure: Fractured Online offers a perfectly good PvE sandbox, so why am I not in love?

Here we are past the month of August (yes really) and I am left kind of conflicted about my feelings toward Fractured Online. On the one hand, I’ve had a perfectly good time in the game and found things to be fine once I worked through some of its gameplay features and controls. But on the other hand I’m ultimately ambivalent.

And that’s weird to me because throughout my entire time in-game, I was never once a victim of the usual sandbox MMORPG nonsense in that I became someone else’s content. I found a PvE sandbox to play around in. I was able to explore, kill mobs, and fiddle with my character without having to look over my shoulder.

So why am I not impressed?

Before I try to write out my thoughts on this question, I should point out that doing the god trials didn’t… seem to work. The god I was following, Tyros, required me to kill exalted enemies in a specific area within a time limit. My first attempt didn’t see me get any such foes, and other times when that same trial spawned, there was no timer and so there was no progress made. Though I was getting divine gifts? I don’t know, it was weird.

Now then, on to my full feelings about Fractured. First, let me first disavow any suggestions about why I feel this way. No, I don’t think the “risk” of being in a PvP realm would have made things more thrilling and dynamic; FFA PvP being called “emergent” is lazy design because cooperation can also be emergent too. And while I will admit to despising click-to-move control and isometric viewpoints, they weren’t a killing blow either; I got around those obnoxious design decisions for the most part and so they just stayed obnoxious.

I also am left counting the ways that Fractured succeeded for me, and one of the absolute biggest has to be the mostly open ability selection system. Despite starting off as a base class, I felt as if I had a pretty wide variety of freedom to mix and match and play with new combinations, and if they didn’t end up feeling right, then it was a simple matter of going back to a hearth, rearranging the abilities I have learned, and trying again.

There are a few gear-specific restrictions for what spells and abilities I can use, and the progression tree does have some pretty specific routes, but those restrictions felt like guard rails more than walls to me. It’s honestly one of the few MMORPGs where I can confidently say that you have the right degree of freedom and creative expression. There are probably more successful and powerful elk-headed mutants out there, but this one is my Elksson, and he is mine.

Also while combat wasn’t exactly what I’d call intense, it also came together over time, and getting into a rotation always feels good in any MMORPG, which held hands with the aforementioned ability swapping mechanics. Trying something and seeing it come together through practice and lots of monster slaughtering was very rewarding.

Lastly, I do kind of dig on how you learn new abilities and strength. It’s not really just by following quests so much as finding monster hotspots and going to absolute town. Very often I would open my knowledge book, see that a certain mob had a spell I wanted, and then focus up on hunting those targets until I got the ability I was chasing after.

But at the same time, therein lies one of Fractured’s bigger problems for me. The so-so combat experience paired with that knowledge book-filling pursuit wasn’t really enough of an intriguing hook for me to care. Sure, I had some freedom in choosing where to go, but for the most part I wasn’t living in a world so much as a murderhobo paradise. I didn’t really have any major mountains to climb (in a figurative sense) or any goals to really reach for.

Exacerbating this would be the absolutely boring crafting system in the game. I don’t know if maybe things get more interesting later down the line here, but the crafting I’ve experienced in the game so far has been no more interesting that the routine survival title’s. And it’s also just as boring as that would lead one to believe: click the right crafting table, click the recipe, click the go button, sit there and wait.

But I think one of the biggest blows to a lot of my enjoyment was seeing how some players had arranged their towns or houses. There weren’t any creative builds or unique setups. There wasn’t any flavor. Literally every building that I walked across was simply a square of ultimate advancement refinement, with rows upon rows upon rows of crafting tables, storage boxes, and other specific character growth items placed down for peak efficiency.

That’s boring as hell, y’all. That’s not creative. That’s… well, I don’t know. It feels wrong.

Now I don’t necessarily fault players for setting things up this way. I would argue that the game itself kind of encouraged that behavior to the point that it seems like the only option that players had when they got to a point of land ownership. Hell, if I got to that point during this playthrough, I probably would have done the same. Just craft the usual My First Four Walls and a Roof of Pure Utility that’s usually the first step in any survivalbox out there.

I also have to admit that maybe the slower pace combat didn’t do me many favors for my interest. I guess I would be more accepting of a PvE sandbox that was nothing more than a murderhobo wonderland of the combat carried any kind of dynamism.

Now I should point out that despite my feelings here, I’m doesn’t necessarily mean I want to write Fractured off wholesale or wish for its demise. On the contrary: I would really like to see Dynamight Studios beef this thing up. Add more activities. Add some quests. Introduce some dungeons. Have some reasons for players to cooperate a bit more.

Perhaps I’m being a whole lot gentler to Fractured because yet again I recognize what the studio went through to get this far. But all the same, I also am removing the game from my drive for the time being. At least this time I’m not doing so out of anger or frustration. I’m doing this in the hopes that more will come later and prompt a new series of thoughts on whether I really do want a PvE sandbox or not.

That’s neither here nor there, though, or at least nothing that anyone reading this column has to worry about. What we’ve got to worry about instead is entering Once Human.

This game has been making headlines for admittedly a lot of not really good reasons, but it also seems to be this weird sort of quicksand pit that players gleefully sink themselves into, so while I’m not arriving to the game to review it (because that’s never been the point of this column), I also will admit to a fair bit of curiosity to dig in more than the bare minimum of time I did previously.

There’s really one poll I can make for this game before we start. I’m obviously going to begin on a PvE scenario/server; the question is which one of them. Assuming there’s any difference between the two, anyway. It’s entirely possible that this is a non-choice.

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Polling wraps up once more at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, September 6th. Until then, it’s time to watch and wait and see if Fractured can pull itself 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.