There is a lot of potential here and Dawn of Fantasy has already improved by leaps and bounds since it was released almost a year ago. Sure, there are still some issues and glitches, but it is moving in the right direction. If you're looking for a pure RTS experience, there are better RTS titles out there. And if you're looking for the MMO side of the equation, naturally there are better MMO titles out there. But if you're looking for a solid MMORTS title, Dawn of Fantasy is one of your best options out there. It is very nice to see people taking the MMORTS out of the browser.
The concept with it's economic parts, RPG elements, real time battles and PvP sounds tempting, but fails due to bugs and game mechanics that haven't been thought through.
This is an excellent game. I don't understand what all this negativity is about. I have only experienced one bug that quickly fixed itself, that's a lot better than some games that are considered classics. The community is great and the gameplay mechanics are all very well thought out. Units and races are very balanced, the economy is solid and it isn't pay to win which is always good to see. The beginner help chat always has at least one member active to guide you past the small learning curve. Give this game a shot, you won't be disappointed!
This is a great game, yes it does have it flaws and bugs but that doesnt ruin the overall fun of playing this game. It has an great community, great devs that help you with every problem. Its a cheap game that provides hours of fun.
It was a good idea in 2003 and would've been a visual stunner back then, today, it's a poor attempt at delivering on a good concept. Too many bugs and crashes even months after release. The idea of building your own empire has a certain appeal, though.
A game with good intentions and some interesting ideas, but its depth and variety of options are shadowed by its slow gameplay, few intuitive controls and flawed grpahics. However, hardcore strategy fans might find an interesting product here thanks to its many possibilities.
It's really unique experience. I guess this game has some issues when it's first released but i haven't played it back then but now this game is great. If you like any kind of RTS you should totally try this game.
Dawn of Fantasy is one of the greatest mmorts games I have played in a long time. The game balances between earning in game currency (crowns) and buying them, making it a fair game and not pay to win. The game currently has a lot of bugs and glitches, but it has a great potential. The game consist of three races: the Elves, Humans and Orcs. They all have their strengths and weaknesses making the game-play balanced. The battles are interactive and reminds of the Stronghold series, which is a good thing. The game should be sold as a beta game because of all the bugs. I give this a 7 because of bugs and inconvenience in game. I believe that this game will reach far.
In Depth Review
Graphics People who play games like this that are strategy based are USED to poor graphics. Usually when you're dealing with 300 models on the screen you rarely have the settings on high. It just lags the game, even in this game I still have to put all the settings on low, so even if it looked good I wouldn't be able to run it at that high during large sieges. Same graphics as Spellforce 2.
Gameplay I'm going to break this into two parts. City development, and Warfare.
City Development This part of the game is its' weakest point. You don't get to customze where things go unless you're an Orc, you don't get to choose where you settle so if you settle in an area without awesome mountains to hide behind then you can't move or find a new spot. Buildings are static for elf/human and the intuitiveness of how they did the buildings (click building, circle thing pops up and select your options) is very unfriendly, especially when you're often clicking on things by accident. Along with this, there's really nothing here but resource gathering you don't plan strategies here, you don't set up schemes... It's all just a resource hub and recruitment hub. Sieges will be there eventually so you will plan for that in the meta game but most of your gameplay will be out in the world map.
Warfare It's pretty damn fun to strategize where to move x units, etc... In fact in concept they did this very well. Each unit has a weakness, you can level your units up and so you end up getting very attached to them and sad when they die. Unfortunately the lag currently that plagues pvp hinders the enjoyment some, but you get used to it. By far this alone is worth buying the game for, as you will find many hours of enjoyment if you really have patience to give it a shot.
Design These guys are obviously new at designing video games, and they've got a long way to go to learn basic gameplay design concepts. The quest system, the UI, the font choices used... all of it says indi developer. Which is fine, I prefer supporting indi developers myself, as they usually have the game concepts I want to play.
The warfare alone is worth buying the game for, but you'll find that the rest of the game is constantly trying to turn you off from playing. Every time you load a new area it has to do this pan-arama view thing that annoys the crap out of me. What's worst is there's no way to auto accept the quests, they literally make you walk your hero unit to each guy and select them. This means you spend several hours just running your guy back and forth between spots, and on top of that when the quest is inside an NPC city you can't accept all the quests at once. You have to accept one, log out (loading screen) and then load back the city (loading screen again). They could make this a 7/10 or even an 8/10 if they just added an option to not have to enter cities to accept/complete quests. The writing is so generically cheesy no one cares about the story anyway.
Do I recommend a buy or pass? I would say buy. Given it's current state its' full of bugs and problems and you will probably be turned off at first by it, but have patience. These guys used to work full time jobs and work on this game part time, but they've recently stated that now they can quit their jobs and work on this full time because of steam and how popular it's become. They've already rolled out a hotfix since it came to steam, so give them a few months to hammer out the bugs but buy now while it's on sale.
The community seems extremely helpful and the amount of people who have joined the game is staggering. I expect this game to explode in the coming months. I just hope they add more monsters to the shop because I want hydras and :)
For those of you that are concerned this is a "pay to win" game. Yes and No. Yes you could potentially spend hundreds of dollars building an army entirely out of the shop. No because none of those units will live forever. Units bought from the shop die permanently, and acquiring crowns is so easy. For example, one PVP siege netted me 20 crowns. The top item in the shop is 120 crowns. So I'd have to win six sieges to get a dragon, and you really only need one. So it's very easy to get crowns in game. Quests give them, pvp gives them. I personally bought crowns because I wanted to get a head start on getting the resource development going in my city. Made sense to me, I'd rather have my cities producing enough resources for me to play with. I didn't have to do this, I could have spent a few hours just gathering resources via battle but I was lazy.
If you have any problems in game the devs have been extremely helpful and they are constantly in the help chat helping people. Very active devs.
Yes my scores in some areas are very low and you're probably wondering why I am recommending it. Honestly, I don't know entirely what has me hooked on this game. I've spent over 10 hours playing it since I bought it yesterday
Dawn of Fantasy has a very clunky interface. It's slow and will make you sea sick after a while. The play is interesting with the excitement of building your own town, but the excitement turns to drag through silly missions and then to anger as a much stronger player can attack you.
What happens after the attack is that your town does regenerate SLOWLY, but your army is gone. As are your units that mine stone, gold etc. This is non-consensual Player vs Player action, a pretty bad idea, just like a non-consensual fight, intercourse etc.
If you enjoy getting owned by a stronger player go for it. If the case that you have no masochistic tendencies skip this game.
Also, missions are pretty dull and the content is missing.
This game has many infuriating shortfalls. Examples: (1) The "online kingdom" (the default game mode) moves at a glacially slow pace. Buildings can literally take upwards of 40 minutes, real time, to construct. At this pace it gets dull very quickly. (2) The UI has many faults ranging from the minor "how the heck am I supposed to find out what this button does?" to "I can't figure out how to quit the game without killing the process!". No really, I had to kill the process because I couldn't figure out how to exit the game. (3) Getting started is unnecessarily tough. For example, to play at all you have to register an account with them your steam account isn't enough. "Remember me" is not the default, so when you forget what you registered with, good luck trying to get it back. Their email-based password reminder system doesn't seem to work! (4) Having paid for the game, I found a lot of the advanced items were for sale for real money. IMHO, **** is free-to-play, I expect this, but if I'm buying the game, I certainly don't expect to get marketed a bunch of premium items to speed up my game experience on top of the purchase price. PC games are meant to be real game experiences. This seems like a glorified Facebook game.
SummarySet in the persistent massively multiplayer online 3D world of Mythador, Dawn of Fantasy, offers you the chance to write your own chapter in the bloody history of this land. Explore a richly-detailed, endless world, from the high mountain peaks of Southmount in the human realm of Teria to the swamps of Erthee l'Bala of the Wood Elves. Co...