Should You Play Gloria Victis in 2023
Should you play gloria victis in 2023? Gloria Victis is an open world medieval fantasy MMORPG with a heavy emphasis on PvP and territory control. At first glance this might not look like much, but there is more to this game than meets the eye and this has really surprised me. The game has been out for awhile in early access, but finally came out into its full release on steam in February 2023, its £15, so under $20 and was reduced to half price on its release, and its been fun but has been a bit of rough release to put it gently. So let’s talk all about Gloria Victis and why you might or might not want to play it.
If you’d rather watch than read, check out our Gloria Victis in 2023 video review below:
Gloria Victis Classes and Character Creation
The game starts you out by picking a starting nation, the noble midlanders, the Ismir vikings or the desert based Sangar Empire. These decide your starting area and this is a faction based game, so make sure if you’re playing with friends to all pick the same faction. Once you’ve done that you make your character, which is fairly basic on options. Then you can either complete a questionnaire to pick your class or pick it manually.
The classes are pretty broad, they basically set you up with a weapon and armor type. This isn’t really that important, it’s more of a starting point as you can put your stats in once you get into the game and swap weapons and armour. And also level all crafting professions. But obviously if you want to be an archer, probably best to put some dexterity in, if you want to wear big armour and a big sword get some strength and constitution.
Leveling in Gloria Victis
So let’s talk about the leveling experience. The game has a pretty quick tutorial that then opens you to just attacking everything. It quickly becomes collecting items, defeating enemies and wildlife and destroying camps. And you zerg around the map defeating everyone and gaining levels. I can’t really talk about the narrative, because it didn’t really grip me. But the leveling experience itself is rewarding. Move to a town, go out, hunt, gather, beat enemies, move to the next quest zone and repeat.
Once you hit around level 50 and complete all the quests you’re allowed to leave the first island and go to the big mainland where the territory wars and pvp really begins. This probably takes anywhere over 5 hours to get to if you’re playing casually and not trying to speed run there. And my biggest worry is that a lot of the people playing this for the first time on release won’t even realize they’re on the beginner island and won’t ever make it to the mainland.
Gloria Victis Combat
So despite the games clear jankiness and old school feel, why make a post about Gloria Victis in 2023? That’s because it has one thing that makes it all worthwhile and that’s the combat. The combat in this game is incredible. It’s very similar to mount and blade, attacks come in, you need to move your sword or shield to that direction to defend it. Attacks can be powered up, mixed up from swings, stabs, overheads. You can kick, cancel and more.
Its so refreshing to have an MMO where the combat isn’t non-impactful or tab-targeted. Like if you swing in the wrong direction, miss a block, don’t put your shield up when an arrow is coming at you, you’re gone. And when you catch someone off guard with an overhead powerful swing, or stun someone and get an attack, it feels so rewarding. It really is so fun and so enjoyable to do this in a pvp focused MMO.
On top of this there are skill points and skill trees so you can spec your person into an absolute armoured chad, a nimble archer with cool archery abilities. Horse archery, medic, lots of cool things. There’s also a big specialization tree where if you do something you gain experience in it and can progress. Use armour and weapons long enough and you can use tier 2 weapons and this goes very in depth.
Territory Battles
As mentioned, once you finish on the beginner island and head to the mainland, every node is connected, farms, lumber mills, forts, castles etc and you can freely roam the map and take them over for your faction.
You can head over alone or with some friends or a guild and take over one of these nodes by defeating all the npc’s and raising the flag. But once you do it alerts the enemy faction and the nodes go on fire, so you’ll quickly see real players coming to take it back, and that gets FUN.
If you successfully take over a node, you become the defender, you can go into the building, access the NPCs, you can upgrade the building and its defences and resources. Gather and give in items to upgrade, man the walls and defend. Or rush out and meet the attackers on the battlefield.
There’s loot points so successful attackers can loot their enemies too! So be ready to craft or buy secondary weapons and armour. I was defending a lumber mill and fell to an enemy who stole my heavy armoured gloves. About 20 minutes later in a separate battle I beat him and took them back, and its interactions like this that make the game so so fun.
The Issues with Gloria Victis
So many positives, so much good to say. So is Gloria Victis in 2023 perfect? Absolutely not, we have to talk about problems. Normally I’d talk about a system like combat and say the good and bad, but with this game, I feel that would turn every system negative, because there is a lot wrong. Getting into this, know it is a janky game that feels very early access even on full release and I’m just going to list out all the major issues that I found when playing.
The servers only hold a small number of people and on release it was hard to get in, there were multiple issues creating characters, getting into the game, and then super bad lag and rubber banding sometimes in game, but the devs were on hand in the discord and super responsive to issues.
Next is what I can only describe as buggy jank. Pve combat can feel clunky. Horse movement and combat is AWFUL, the horse is so static. Siege weapons feel a little glitchy. And overall there is just a huge early access sandbox feel that is everywhere.
I love gathering and crafting in MMORPGs, games like new world, final fantasy and wow do it fantastic. But man I tried to gather in this game and it was shocking. You just stand at a rock and swing a pickaxe, for ages, like until the node is depleted. I tried gathering for 20-30 minutes, never again.
Should you play Gloria Victis in 2023?
In summary, this isn’t a AAA MMORPG made by square enix or blizzard, and it doesn’t have a huge buy in, or a sub or anything like that. It’s less than £20, it’s a really unique MMO for a certain type of player. Someone who loves realistic medieval combat, large scale rewarding and punishing pvp and old school interactions in the open world.
I see this game’s problems, I can tell it’s not perfect, but I have had so much fun. I bought this just cos it looked cool and I wanted to review it, but I’m going to be playing this a lot just with friends, roaming around pvping and having fun. It’s not for everyone, but for the price, there is a lot of fun to be had here! If you’ve watched this and think it’s your cup of tea, give it a try, if not, I hope you’ve at least enjoyed the review.
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