This MMO Will Ruin My Life - Bitcraft Review
99I don't go super deep into it but I could not shake the Runescape comparisons from my head, despite them being vastly different shapes. It was everything from the movement to the job stuff. I loved it. Brighter Shores should be taking some notes, although I'm not sure what the notes would say exactly.
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Bitcraft is an MMO about cooperative city building in a massive terraformable world where libertarian societies can finally flourish. This is it's biggest fantasy element.
At it's crux it’s a crafting-benchathon where you're making things to make other things to finally make a better bench. While streaming it for friends monkey and I were constantly apologising for how boring it appeared. We'd say things like "this is way more exciting than it looks" as our character stands plowing the earth at a bench for 100 manure piles.
I got to play an early alpha earlier this year, it's unbalanced, rubberbandy and it made my computer run red hot for no good reason at all. Which is bad because I once left it running all day and I'm pretty sure my GPU has never been the same since. but something about it is as life ruiningly Addictive as it is GPU destroying. It's Addictive enough to remote desktop to during the middle of the work day to set my character to long grinding tasks. My boss watches these videos now.
If job skilling in Runescape ever lit a neurone in your head then this game will set your skull on fire. You can level a number of different jobs which helps unlock different parts of the tech tree by allowing you to gather higher level materials. The catch is that every job has crossovers with every other occupation. Meaning you either need to take a million years to get good at everything yourself, or specialise and rely on a community of players to create a life worth living. Knowing gamers... You'd rather build Rome all by yourself than share a base with anyone who isn't in your discord server. Romulus, you've been kicked by the mods, we've given you several warnings about posting memes about sucking on wolf titties, it's in the past we don't talk about it anymore.
I make it loudly clear among my friends that i am deathly allergic to crafting benches. I got sick of them after every dev got the idea that Crafting benches equalled instant success on Steam Greenlight. I'm not entirely sure why this game managed to hack my brain. Perhaps it's the fact that every time I chop a tree it makes my character build just a little more useful to everyone else.
Bitcraft desperately wants you to lean into an occupation, so each job class unlocks it's own uniforms and title cards as you level up. On your base you can post job listings that can automatically accept any players into your settlement with the requisite skills. Don't like mining stone all day, leave it to someone else.
This game does away with regular survival mechanics, at least for the zones we were in. food is for stamina regeneration and I didn’t lose a single bit of HP during my entire month of playing. In fact the most prominent survival mechanics have been implemented on the base itself. YOU might not be able to starve but your house sure can.
You stake a claim on the world with and everything within your border is uneditable by non-citizens. Housing can be built and rented to other players and permissions can be granted. The bigger your territory the faster it eats resources. Resources are cheap craftables you can make and deliver to the town to extend it's up-time. A small plot that fits two people can easily be topped up to survive for a couple days with about ten minutes effort.
If it runs out of Resources it becomes an unclaimed site and will slowly decay. During this time it can be reclaimed or pillaged and I seriously recommend taking advantage of this, picking through ruins is a great way to kick start your collection of building recipes, and you can save yourself hours of work by picking up where someone else left off.
People's base names show up on the world map, and become their own important landmarks. Quite often monkey and I would say things like "yeah I'm just a little north west of Barbra Streisands" which is cool.
The starter biome undulates but later zones get treacherous to navigate, I foresee a future where people carve through these zones or set up points to guide the way through. You can also set trade depots and I wonder if people will ever organise central hubs and ports to circulate resources from other biomes. The long term potential of this game is massive.
The game seems like it's still years away from release, but monkey and I feverishly grinded as many levels as we could, knowing full well in just a few days all our progress would disappear into nothing.
In short this game is just like real life.