Bite Sized Previews: Myth of Empires
MMO’s. Once the genre to beat, very few MMOs find solid success these days. This is largely due to the ‘Big Fish in a Small Pond’ philosophy. With World of Warcraft, Runescape, Elder Scrolls Online, and Final Fantasy 14 leading the pack, there’s a finite resource of people willing to invest time and money into these games.
I’ve never been a massive MMO player myself. I never got into World of Warcraft in my teens, nor was I particularly interested in any other massively online game. I made an attempt to get into them in the 2010s with Archeage. Oh man, that was a disappointment. While I enjoyed most of my time with the game, the pay-to-win mechanics got out of control, and it suffered from all the problems that plague MMOs. Server downtime, bots taking up all the housing plots and cheating, vastly overpriced microtransactions: all of the crap things that make me dislike online gaming. After a frustrating few months in 2014, I gave up ArcheAge for good, and that was the end of my experience with MMOs overall.
That makes me a rare audience for something like Myth of Empires, which recently left Early Access. Big thanks to the developers through Keymailer for the review code, as I was intrigued by its premise. A big, open sandbox that can also be played solo? I’ve been in the mood for more of these games recently. While I no longer play MMOs in general, I’ve enjoyed my time with games like Conan Exiles. I am more of a ‘solo’ player with my gaming tastes, and Myth of Empires contains a full solo mode with some impressive customization. Due to some frustrating technical problems, this will be a less in-depth look than I wanted, unfortunately. Consider it a very early preview, but I’m happy to do a follow-up review after the teething troubles have been fixed.
To write this preview, I tried out the multiplayer mode. However, as with all games that rely on servers, I found that experience challenging. The rare times I was able to get into a server through massive queues and wait times, I ran into frequent disconnects and timeouts. As you can imagine, this was not an ideal first impression. As my laptop lacks the specs to run Myth of Empires well, I used Nvidia’s Geforce Now cloud service to play the game. Due to the inactivity limitations of the cloud, the queues to join a server resulted in my Geforce Now sessions ending before I could get in. All in all, a frustrating experience. The developers have been adding more servers to boost performance, so hopefully, when I get around to playing Myth again, I’ll have more luck playing in the multiplayer servers.
So I went into my own little world, and I was quite impressed by the level of customization Myth of Empires offers. Players can edit pretty much everything in their own personal server. How many NPCs, and variables on the survival mechanics, what can develop on the map. The amount of options available to tweak goes above and beyond many games in this category. The same goes for the graphics and accessibility options. Overall, they get a big thumbs up from me on that.
As for the gameplay itself? I’ve only dabbled in the world for a few hours, but I came away with mixed feelings. As someone who rarely plays these games, I forgot about the mission design. All sorts of fetch quests and simple missions like ‘kill this bear’. The graphics are pretty stunning and I enjoyed exploring the locations, but none of the buildings I came across could be entered. It felt more static than other games in the genre. Still, as a comfort food exploration game, I enjoyed my time with it.
I know this little preview had little to go on, largely due to the technical problems I had with the server overloads. This is pretty common for any big multiplayer game, and once these problems are eased, I’ll give it another try. In the meantime, I hope you all had fun with my rambles, and a reason why I don’t really play these MMO games!
