If you’ve kept your pulse on the MMORPG community this month, you may have seen a huge uptick in interest for the medieval MMORPG Gloria Victis following their official launch out of Early Access and a Steam sale that made it much easier for new players to join the fight. However, this huge increase in popularity has also impacted the servers and my ability to actually log in and play the game with friends. Read on to see my initial thoughts of the game before our full review.
One game that I love coming back to time and time again with friends is Planetside 2. You can probably imagine just how excited I was to see that Gloria Victis calls itself “a medieval MMORPG where Mount & Blade meets Planetside 2!” Now, I’ve never played Mount & Blade myself, but I have sunk a lot of playtime into Chivalry 2 and almost 100 hours alone into Planetside 2. If you can manage to get into the Gloria Victis servers, you get to choose one of three factions for your character: the Midlanders, the Ismirs, or the Sangmar. Each faction has their own unique lore and heraldry with two branching background paths to help you decide what kind of theme you’d like to roll with. For this playthrough, my friends and I decided to go with the Midlanders which are loosely based on medieval continental Europe.
As with most games, the first screen you encounter is character creation. While there isn’t anything that stands out about character creation, I am pretty content with the options that are provided. There is a fairly wide range of hairstyles, skin tones, and complexions to create a decent-looking character. You can’t change or sculpt anything about your body like proportions or height, but it didn’t upset me too much.
Character creation is also the first place we get to see a preview of the armor in Gloria Victis. It’s always a pleasant surprise to see realistic armor in video games, and Gloria Victis doesn’t disappoint in that aspect. Midlanders favor medieval European armor sets, Isimir uses Viking attire, and Sangmar takes inspiration from the Roman and Byzantine empires.
Gloria Victis is an open-world MMORPG, so after you spend some time on the tutorial island you can go out and do what you like- be that PvP, quests, or crafting. The graphics of Gloria Victis are decent, but again nothing just mind-blowing that I haven’t seen before. Now, being familiar isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In my opinion, it simply feels like the development team has done a great job establishing a solid foundation for Gloria Victis. It is comfortable and familiar. Nothing too out there, and it doesn’t feel like it's lacking in many features. There is a player trade system, group dueling, an auction house, and detailed crafting; every time I turn around, I discover a great quality-of-life addition to the game and then some. With that being said, as I progress through Gloria Victis, I begin to see more and more of the features that make it stand apart from other games on the market.
Combat, however, might take me a little bit to get used to. There are talent trees and stat attribute points that really let you go ham on customizing how your character plays in combat. When you create your character you can select from a handful of predetermined classes but they are mainly there to determine a few of your starting bonuses. You can absolutely customize and tweak your class later on down the road (until level 90 for free!) to play with various builds and find the playstyle that works for you. More on that in our full review later.
Moving through a battlefield feels “sticky” and jumping downright makes me sick with its jarring animation. Just don’t do it, don’t jump. Also, beware of when you go browse through the auction house because you can get held hostage by other players body-blocking you in. But, for me, Gloria Victis really shines with its melee combat.
I made the mistake of starting with a bow, and the playstyle is just incredibly boring right now. Maybe that will change down the road, but melee combat lets you block and attack according to the direction you and your opponent are facing as well as kick to stun and knock your opponent out of their block. You could have great gear for your level, but if you don’t block and stand in one place, you’ll see huge chunks of your health go down. Melee combat just feels so much more involved, and definitely relies on skill. With that being said, I did notice that there is an entire tree that lets me spec into summoning and using my horse mount more efficiently so maybe I can try out a cavalry build in the next week. We’ll see how that goes.
So far, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time in Gloria Victis. One of my favorite parts of the game is grouping up with friends and everyone running around together like a little party of bandits with our guild heraldry on our shields. It’s a ridiculously fun time. The lack of magic and low fantasy themes also make the experience feel much more grounded-something I haven’t gotten to experience for a while with my MMORPGs. I typically play World of Warcraft, Runescape, and Guild Wars 2. None of those are really grounded in the low fantasy realm, so it’s a nice change of pace.
This past week has seen a lot of server trouble for Gloria Victis, so I admittedly haven’t been able to dive in as much as I would like to. Kudos to the team for throwing up a few more servers with the sudden influx of players in the world. A new issue however has cropped up and is still an issue as of typing this Review in Progress: DDOSing. Insert eye roll emoji here. Hopefully next week these issues will iron themselves out so I can get back to rolling around with my little band of murderhobo friends. My mind keeps drifting back to Gloria Victis throughout the week, despite all the other games I have in my repertoire to play…so they must be doing something right to keep me hooked and coming back.
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