Easing into Enshrouded

I had a meandering post last week about how I arrived at Enshrouded, with a little bit of starting off, but not much about the game itself… mostly because I hadn’t played that far in. (It is still on sale on Steam for a few more days.)

As is my now predictable pattern, which is to try and write about each game I play about once a week, I am back with how it feels a dozen hours in.

It is nice.

It is nice in kind of the way I needed something nice right about now.

It is not perfect.  I mean, straight off once Potshot and I were in the game together I discovered that there is no in-game chat.  I have played online games since 1986 and I struggle to recall any game online that didn’t have some form of communication.  Text chat is such a solved problem at this point that it is almost bizarro world to not include it unless your game is a sociological experiment in interacting without communication.  One of the videos I posted earlier in the week has Raph Koster a bit embarrassed at the primitive level of in-game chat in Stars Reach currently, and yet it is functional in that way that long time gamers have become accustomed, with a slash command for actions and straight text for chat.  Stars Reach even has dialog bubbles.

But Enshrouded just isn’t having it.  I searched on chat for the game and found one of their posts on Steam where they suggest Discord as a pretty good option to use for chat while in the game.

So there is that, and you can just tell that is going to be one of those things I just keep gnawing on.

Meanwhile, the game itself is a pretty standard co-op survival sandbox venture, with crafting and building and exploration and a smattering of quests.  I could write a description of it that could fit a half dozen other titles, so it is perhaps not a unique gem in the genre.  And I’d be hard pressed to find another example therein that didn’t include text chat.

I mean, it has level based progression.

And it also gates progression in the world via levels.  The further you go from the starting area the higher the level of the mobs you run into.  That is a little rough… they seem to jump a bit in levels if you wander in some directions rather than others.

You can customize you character with a talent point system that is somewhere between standard MMO and Path of Exile in scale.

Crafting is part of the package, though they have an interesting twist where you have to go find the NPCs that unlock crafting to expand what you can do.

That also has an impact on progression and how much you can expand your base.

I have mostly spent time with melee combat, but there is a whole magic path to go down as well.  Plus there is archery, and done in a way I actually really like.

It also has a couple of special things, like the grappling hook, which is used to pull yourself up place or to swing across things.  You need to make one pretty early on as it gates some of the content.

And then there is the glider… which true to its name lets you jump off of high places and glide across the landscape.

There is also the whole shrouded area, that foggy bit you see in the above image, where you can only stay for a specific duration.  I’ll probably get more into that, but I am feeling more like a breezy overview of things today.

But mostly I think I like it because it is kind of pretty and fun to explore.  Some days that is all you need I guess.

In that way it is more like Conan Exiles, with a crafted world that is the same for everybody as opposed to the random world generation of Valheim.

Granted, the world isn’t done yet.  Potshot and I were out exploring and I had to ask if he also saw what appeared to be a translucent red wall off in the distance.  He did, so we went to explore it and, on stepping through it, received a dire warning.

We had wandered to the edge of the early access area.  I wasn’t sure what it was going to do to me when the counter ran down, so I ran back out post haste.

So yeah, no hiding the fact that we’re still in early access… though maybe the lack of in-game chat was the real hint on that front.

Potshot and I continued exploring, eventually finding another death trap that we glided directly into.  But at least the game puts your corpse marker… you have to go find that to pick up the stuff that was in your backpack with our current settings, though your equipped gear stays with you… on the edge of the place that killed you and not on the spot you eventually died on.

But mostly it just looks good, which makes it inviting to carry on with.

We have barely gone far at all in the game.  There are a number of paths to follow, including the usual base building aspect that we often over-indulge in.  So there is lots to see still.

We have been wary of the shroud, the murky areas of the world in which it is hazardous to linger.  But we’ll get to that soon enough I am sure.