Have you grown tired with what modern MMO have to offer? Do you feel there’s not enough role-playing in role-playing games? Do you dream of being part of and have an impact on massive fantasy world? To truly be a part of an epic story rather than have some NPC get all the credit?
I wanted something more from MMORPG experience - a living, breathing world, with players filling roles in all walks of life. For a long time I struggled to figure out how this could be achieved and after much pondering I came up with a new, outlandish approach to playing MMORPGs. And that’s when I decided to create Soulforged.
The gameplay in Soulforged is nothing like your usual World of Warcraft. The main way of interacting with the game is issuing actions for your avatar to do and simply leave them to their own devices, where actions can take from a few seconds to hours. The world persists at all times and your avatar is always present in the game world - carrying out action you assigned. The game enables varying game styles which allow you to tailor your role to fit your daily life by adjusting how often you interact with the game. In the world of Soulforged you could take on any of the many roles the game presents:
As an explorer traverse the world and survive the dangers all to find new exotic materials or locations;
As a researcher you would collect all the different items and produce available and trying to work out how they can be combined to discover new recipes;
As a crafter - be it a smith, leatherworker or one of many other - you will use your skills to produce useful items and, as your skill increases, you will get to make some really rare and powerful pieces;
As a farmer your character will simply spend most of their day tending to the crops and while you decide what to produce;
As a trader you can spend the time travelling between different player-made towns and provide the materials or gear that might be in demand, but lacking due to resources or skill;
As an adventurer you will be venturing into dangerous and rewarding dungeons that reward very active and full engaged play style;
At no point you are required to commit to a single style, you can mix, match and maybe find new ways to interact with the game and other players. Whatever the case is, to fully leverage your playstyle you’ll want to engage with other players - who will be providing gear, nutrition, materials or other items, all of which will enable you to better perform in the aspects of the game that matter to you.
The game can sometimes be harsh, almost unforgiving. When taking the risks your character may end up suffering serious injury or dying. Death in this game has a serious impact - your character will take with them their skills and drop anything they carried. But that doesn’t mean no meaningful progress can be made - you will keep anything you have in your storage and any recipes you have previously researched. In addition to that, your future characters can be customized with various unlockable traits. And while death may look scary, there’s no escaping it - as characters grow old they all eventually depart.
All you need to play the game is having a Google account. As for the pricing - there’s no upfront cost, no fees, no credit cards, no subscriptions, no micro-transactions. In other words - there’s no way to spend any money on this game and there are no plans on changing that in the future. This is a passion project that is managed on a very low budget and that’s what enables this model to work.
Please bear in mind that the game is very much work in progress and it keeps evolving and improving fairly regularly. I’m also very interested to hear feedback, criticism or feature requests for the game - even with a handful of players who engaged with my game so far I already had a lot of useful feedback and many changes were made to the game based on that, all to provide a better experience.
Would you like to learn more? Check out the website and make sure to take a look at the Feature List!
If you’d like to play, then head straight to https://soulforged.net:8443/