Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: There’s a new grimdark isometric ARPG on the horizon featuring PvPvE combat in a new twist on the extraction RPG genre. I know, I know. Just like last year, spring brings with it flowers and rain showers and also fresh new extraction games. But don’t jump into the comments with an eyeroll just yet; you’ve got to hear me out this time!
Gods, Death, and Reapers (we’ll just stick to GDR from here on out) has got a little bit of that something special in it. It’s got that pixie dust (or maybe that’s just the ashes of your foes) making it really sparkle. I played it during the playtest a couple of weeks ago, and even though my colleagues warned me about Wolcen Studio’s history in the multiplayer games space, all I’ve want to do since is log back in a play it again.
While GDR is an on-the-nose ARPG with PvPvE extraction combat, but it’s also got a whole lot of gameplay and a really nice reward cycle that encouraged me to want to keep playing. Honestly, it gave me a lot of the same warm fuzzies I got back when I played Legacy: Steel and Sorcery Eldegarde earlier this year, which is saying something because I absolutely adored Eldegarde. It was going to be my go-to game for the foreseeable future. Sadly, it was the very foreseeable future.
At a high level, you’ve got your core extraction RPG systems in place. You enter a match, run around to collect loot, and try to find an extraction point without dying so you can get out with all those sweet shinies. Along the way you’ll encounter monsters and other vile baddies who don’t really want to part with their gear and don’t particularly want you to take it home. At the same time, there’s a number of other players roaming around the zone trying to do the same thing, including taking your gear! If you aren’t able to extract – or if you die – you’ll lose everything you brought with you and looted, the exception being a few trinkets you can keep in your hidden pocket.
There are no classes in GDR, either, so your skills are based on whatever weapon set and gear you’re wearing. It’s pretty nice because you’re able to pick up anything that looks shiny, and if it’s strong, go ahead and equip it. It also means you’re not tied down to a single class, although the weapon sets do essentially play as a class – you’re just not locked into it. Currently, there are only four sets: one each for a dual wielding rogue, a spear/shield set (very reminiscent of Guild Wars’ Paragon), a bruiser with a warhammer, and a staff creating a spellcaster.
Each weapon set gives you three active abilities, which you’re able to swap out while in the lobby. Each of those has four options to choose from, and your equipped armor will also gives you a single active ability. Pair those four skills with a dodge, a few consumables, and an ultimate skill, and that’s a fully loaded character. From the weekend of play, I felt as if there were a lot of good ways to adjust my build to suit my playstyle. During a match, you do have a number of tools at your disposal, but not so many that you’re overwhelmed with hotbars. Just the one is enough.
In GDR, you enter every match at level 1, and as you kill baddies, you’ll gain XP and level up. So in that way it reminds me a bit of a MOBA; everyone enters the match at roughly the same power level. Of course, if you came in wearing some higher-end gear, then you’ll steamroll a player who didn’t. So there’s obviously a bit of risk/reward right there.
Another interesting aspect is that even when you die in a match, you actually have the opportunity to respawn and recover your (or another’s!) body and even recollect your lost loot should it still be lying about. Sure, corpse runs are far from a new concept in games, but I hadn’t seen it in an extraction game before now. Usually when you’re dead, you’re dead.
There’s also currently no cooperative team play. It’s a fully solo experience – minus the other players trying to take you out!
Outside of a match, you have a lot of the shops and ways to build up your character beyond just the gear you take into combat with you. Unlike in Eldgarde and even Arc Raiders, the lobby isn’t just screens and interfaces that describe the locations of shops with lists to browse. It’s a fully developed zone you run around and explore. And as you complete quests and grow, the lobby zone physically grows as well. You’ll be building new areas and even leveling them up.
There are also many quests you can begin as well, giving you some real direction in your matches. These will be your usual collection and kill quests, but some of them are also more like achievements. For example, you’ll need to activate a skill a certain number of times or use that skill to dodge out of an attack or something similar.
I’m a bit ashamed to admit it I’ve never really played Diablo or its chosen offspring. I just missed it. And I missed a whole slew of other isometric ARPGs, so there’s no bonus nostalgia points for GDR there. That also applies to Wolcen too. So perhaps there’s some obvious similarities that I’m overlooking, and to that I say, oh well!
One thing that GDR does right is include dedicated PvE zones that forego the need to scare you off with an early death from a passing player. These are the initial zones you are join. Until you reach level 3 or 5 or something, you’re actually restricted from joining the PvP zones. That’s something similar that even Eldgarde added. I wouldn’t say that they’re safe zones by any means since the enemies can still overwhelm you if you’re not careful, but at least you can get your feet wet and comfortable with the gameplay before you get ganked.
Combat is really smooth. and all the animations and hit boxes feel right too. In a departure from Diablo-style play, you use proper WASD to move rather than clicking, which is a good thing! When I’m in a PvP environment, I absolutely hate click to move. I need more fine control than that! Dodge frames work great as well for repositioning. Anytime I play a game now that doesn’t offer some baseline dodging, it annoys me, so Wolcen Studio did that right.
The rest of the controls are also based on MOBA, FPS, or whatever we want to call the common keybinds these days, where everything is bound around the WASD buttons. I’m talking about Q, E, R, Z, and the like. Of course, you can change those, which I do, because I’m an MMO person and I need things to be hotbar-style casting, but I’ve just gotten accustomed to re-binding my keys every time I open a new game. It’s part of my first 30 minutes plus of play.
Within the zones there were also dungeons and bosses to fight too. The dungeons are locked, so you need to find and use a key before you’re allowed in, but since the keys are items, they can be extracted for next time.
There were some weird rubberbanding issues when I used a skill that could rush forward really far or push an enemy back. It was funny to magically teleport to the other side of a giant rock while I was fighting, but I figure kinks like that’ll get smoothed out. It’s not like I had any hard crashes or anything.
Wolcen Studios has said that this will be a free-to-play title with purchasable cosmetics and non-power enhancing purchase options. Of course, only time will tell with respect to that, but we’ll see in time.
Let me sum up: After having played it over a few evenings, I’ve got some good news and some bad news about GDR. The good news is it absolutely slaps. I want to log back in right now, and I want to bash some skulls! But the bad news is twofold: I can’t play right now because the playtest is closed (boo!), and I haven’t had a good track record with games I really enjoyed recently. They all close down or give up. Eldegarde was too good for this world. Surely my luck can’t be so bad. Right? Right??
There aren’t any more playtests currently announced yet, but you should definitely keep your eyes peeled for more in the future. I know I will!
