Famous hope for survival in the Middle Ages, but there is still much work to do
Blog Andrew Joseph 13 Jun , 2025 0
No one would claim that the medieval European flavored infrastructure survival game is bringing whole new ideas to the genre. If you've played with something like this, from its main inspiration Rust, to more modern iterations like Runescape: DragonWilds, you can have a great idea of everything you do when you fall into the server and start your journey from modest homestead to the realm. My short hands-on time was fun, but I didn’t answer a significant question clearly: If you currently have a survival game, is it worth switching now?
My crash course started with a tour of some of the ideal structures built with in-game resources. Some of them, like a huge castle, have a shadow of a small village wandering around, and if the team takes me on the tour, led by competition director Jesse Jacobsen, they didn't expect to see players do it without teamwork. But it's cool to have people in a reasonable range of players. Tall solid stone walls with powerful working gates to keep enemies away from them, winding halls and spiral stairs are more than usually just square rooms, filled with storage. I walked through my own couple with a lot of investment in time and gaming money and positioned it as your typical final gaming stronghold in the form of hope that it would look like before a regular server reset.
So it's right to spend a while the first quarter we're going to tear one of them in the raid, right? After a fast spinning of the catapult, some developers placed themselves in a nearby fortress, while my group tried to conquer it. We left the siege behind and chose more mobile devices: the hammer and the explosive petard turned them into pieces. When inside, we walked through the halls and stairs for battle and ended up in a huge skirmish on the castle. After putting down the enemy, we took up the banner of the castle and claimed for ourselves.
These interesting scenes make up most of the famous scenes that tend toward players who would rather raise their swords than hammers to build. This is enhanced by a melee system that takes clues from games like Knight, Mordhau, or Kingdom (Come Come: Deliverance). Swinging weapons at various angles produces different offensive actions, which is useful for the safest and most reliable defense around the shield. For bold players, the existence of Parry, in the right time, can be a quick attack, helping to poke holes in a stubborn defender. In a one-on-one duel, all these nuances shine and create a tense back and forth in a simpler melee system. This is not very realistic, but the mixing of every strike with the lethality of the motion-captured Hema animation does enhance swordplay. In a multiplayer fight, I hardly rely on these tools, but instead chose to trick the people my squad into bullying away to overwhelm them. Maybe it's very realistic after all.
The right battle is the driving force behind the need for Jesse and executive producer Charlie Ettershank to realize reality. “Since I met Charlie and we’ll be talking about how cool Knight fights can be in survival games for most of the nights after school,” Jesse told me. They played games like Kings and Rust Regions, and they liked everything about it besides melee combat and deceived themselves, creating what they wanted to see in the world.
Of course, you can't be a bad guy knight on the deck without first knocking the tree down with a stick to build everything that will produce your empire. The partying process in a survival game like this has never been something I confidently call “attractive” but famous characters are particularly boring compared to their peers. Some parts of the process are streamlined – you still need to build separate fixtures to make specific things, such as tailors’ benches to make leather armor and stone stoves to smell metal – but all the crafts can be done in the stock menu, so you don’t have to stop on every little building to make and receive things. But collecting materials is more like a tedious task than ever before. Things are very expensive, so you need a lot of wood and stone to get the basics. At least they are easy to find. I spent 10 minutes walking around looking for animals to find skin and fat, which is essential for animals passing through the tech tree and can't find anything. I think all of this is different on other players’ servers who may harass you at your party and construction events, but in this laid-back environment I find it difficult to keep the power going for grinding. The “survival” part of well-known people is also part of the PVP, because if there is no enemy arrow to dodge, there is not much to manage your own life. Without a hunger meter or a type of staple food for day/night cycles, I can be completely free to exist. These mechanisms are usually na, but without them, there is little impetus for being alone.
There are many steps between making your first workstation and creating a sword, which you can bypass if you are willing to venture into the wilderness for loot. I haven't experienced this part of the famous in any meaningful way, but I've been told that pre-built points of interest, such as the aforementioned big castle, doubles the hotspot full of gear and trinkets, can be upgraded to the player suite immediately, or at least worth a lot of gaming gold. I can only speculate that this surrounds the same dangers as other popular survival games in a PVP environment, but I can’t talk about how this is how it’s famously focused on intimate close combat. Sounds great, but I either haven't experienced them directly or haven't had them yet.
I think this biggest feature will be an important feature of famous success, which is a server event. As far as current access is concerned, the task of 8000 or so players in Alpha is to find their own fun, the construction and combat system are all in the open possibilities sandbox without any clear direction of the game itself. Currently, a solid player teaming up to marching on enemy camps to build strongholds and siege weapons is not a big hint, but even the RDBK team admits that some guided games will bring some necessary balance. An event they've been prototyping will turn NPC's solution into a claimable fortress when signaling, driving all the Vanmen Warrior bands on the server join each other in a chaotic battle. Other ideas are in a similar form to this, and the cache of spawning at specific locations on the map will be ensured by anyone first.
But Jesse does emphasize his importance, frankly proud, and he is a facilitator of the sandbox thriving for individual communities. His team has even reached out and recruited nearly all official Rust Server hosts to run the famous servers. “It’s mainly because we provide them with the tools … to make the process simple,” Jesse assured, and financially compensated for the efforts. The goal is that they can use their specific expertise to help modify and regulate game tools and create server climates that can meet a variety of players. Maybe I'm not the only one who thinks the grinding is slow, as there might be a server to increase pace or start the player using the kit to get out of the block faster. Servers are wiped weekly to prevent players from being unable to overcome their progress, but there are servers where these wipes occur less frequently, if any. The well-known team wants to be as close to the adaptability of infinite players as possible, and they want to be involved like a server host to make it happen. “We think we have a good idea for the funniest aspects of the game, but we don’t deceive ourselves and think no one can think of something better in this sandbox, right?”
Many of the solidity of Enown's Alpha State is manageable and may even be great when you have a dedicated community to play with it. But there are some pain points that can make it sell for people who haven’t bought it for a long time. I have a lot of performance issues when playing – whether it's a developer or alone. Frame stimulation and lag can really ruin me when I need stability most. The current UI and menus are rough around the edges and are inconsistent throughout the process, with some tooltips spread all over the selection wheel, while others sit in lists that are difficult to navigate within the action range. All of these things are being reformed and fixed on the list, and as the development team expands, hopefully ahead of its planned third quarter 2025 early access release.
Enown's crunchy battle has great potential. You have to trek for a cool basic collection and build game that is very primitive and there is still a way to meet the quality standards of the games you wish to compete with. Although strictly speaking, while its lack of content, stability issues and a ragged UI are the responsibility of RDBK Studios, the community is expected to have a lot of control over the everyday experience. Time will tell whether the former can be quickly brought together to cultivate the latter.