How important is grouping in Saga of Lucimia? Very. In fact, it’s so central to the idea of what the devs believe MMORPGs should be about that they reject the idea that forced group content is hardcore. To illustrate that position, Creative Director Tim “Renfail” Anderson recounts a story about a player livestream of the game’s recent release in which some of the players participating were killed by overleveled content and struggled to recover their corpses and gear.

“I was a bit amused at the amount of talk about how ‘hard’ the game was and how ‘frustrating’ it was and why was the streamer playing a game that was not ‘100% win all the time’ (paraphrasing a bit here, obviously),” he says. “I was also a bit confused the group hadn’t bothered to reach out to the community at large to ask for help; they were instead banging their heads against a brick wall of trying to go it alone.”

He criticizes them for being unprepared, for not having brought a healer, for bringing too few characters, and for not asking the broader pre-alpha community for aid. In fact, Anderson himself roused some other testers to help the streamers, “ultimately leading to a two-hour gameplay session during which new friendships were formed.”

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