I seem to have lost about 30 to 40 hours of my time recently to this without realising it.
Cube World is a sandbox, completely open and procedurally generated RPG that feels like something you'd get if you crossed Minecraft with a dungeon crawler. Costs about 15 Euros to participate in the Alpha. All character data is saved locally, not serverside, so nothing's wiped as the alpha continues.
The entire game is done in big chunky voxels and it looks pretty good, but also seems to completely hammer the crap out of whatever CPU power you've got going. This struggles at the moment on low power CPUs, much more so than Minecraft.
You can pick from a handful of different races (Lizardmen are awesome!) and the 4 classes Warrior, Mage, Ranger and Rogue. Each class can specialise in one of two different skill trees that change the way you play.
It's initially very confusing, so trying to explain it from a newbie's perspective is probably gonna be just as confusing...
You're effectively dumped in the middle of a randomly generated map, with no tutorial, no guidance as to what you're doing. Just a 'here you go, you're level 1, have some starting equipment and press F1 for controls'. It explains NOTHING to you. What you're supposed to do, game content, crafting systems, none of it.
You can explore the map. Find caves that house mineral deposits such as Iron or Silver, maybe even Emerald, Ruby and Diamond if you're lucky. You can take these minerals to a town and use them in crafting armour, weapons, amulets, etc.
You can stumble across random areas of interest such as dungeons or catacombs (This reminded me a LOT of Oblivion, randomly going around and finding these areas then raiding them for loot).
You can do missions. On your map, you'll see a crossed swords icon appear over certain locations. Going to these areas and killing the designated bosses will give you an experience bonus, and some platinum coins which you can use in town to adjust your gear and bring it up (or even down!) to your current level. At the moment, this is bugged, and adjusting items to your level requires an absolutely insane and impossible amount of platinum coins, so hopefully this'll be one of the first bugs fixed in the alpha.
Levelling your character is very, very strange... First off, there are an infinite amount of levels, but you don't get infinitely powerful. You have a character level, and a 'power level' that goes between 1 and 100. All equipment requirements are based on class and power level, not character level. Each time you level up, you get 2 skill points to add to your skill tree.
Levelling works the exact opposite you'd expect it to. Levelling from 1 to 2 is very slow, but then it starts slowly getting faster, and faster as you progress. The more you level up, the easier it is to level up (to an extent). Power gain from levelling is logarithmic, as opposed to exponential. Your first few levels, you'll increase in power rating very quickly, but as you start to progress through later levels, it can take quite a few before you see your next power rating go up.
Level 1 to 2 for example, will put you from Power 1 to Power 6.
To get to Power 100, you need to reach level 1300+
Skills gain in exactly the same way. The first few points are very effective but then you get diminishing returns. It takes something along the lines of 150,000 skill points into pet riding to get the maximum benefit. That's level 75,000 if you did nothing but level pet riding.
Finding a place suitable for your power level is easy, and even if you're partying with a Level 1, with Level 300's, you'll still be able to play together and level together at a suitable difficulty for everyone. The map will procedurally generate dungeons and mobs that are of both level 300, and level 1 variety, as well as in-between, but if you discover an area that's too hard (Mobs above your level also regularly spawn), you can level up then return to it to tackle later.
It takes a while to click, but when it does, it's extremely addictive. My partner, my friend and I all roll together on a private server as a Warrior, Ranger and Mage combo (healing mage!), constantly gear chasing and boss destroying with increasing difficulty. The fast levelling keeps things interesting and makes progressing through later levels very fun. You just have a bit of a rough start is all.
The usual gear system is in - White commons, Green uncommons, Blue rares, Purple super rares, and Golden legendaries (as well as red uniques, but I don't think these are implemented right now).
You can also customise your weapons, which is REALLY neat and also increases it's power. A longsword for example has room for 32 additional voxels to be placed on it (Iron Nuggets found via mining caves), so you can change the look and come up with some really awesome designs. Each additional voxel placed slightly increases the power.
Bosses also drop 'Spirits', which are coloured voxels that add different buffs such as lifesteal or fire damage.
It's effectively a dungeon crawler without limitations or barriers. Log on, level up, play with friends, tame a pet, go ride it, do some hang gliding, go exploring and find a giant ocean, go sailing in it with your boat, and you're always progressing.
Unfortunately, the official site is being hammered with a DDoS attack and has been for days since it launched. For some reason the developer doesn't seem interested in accepting people's offers of help for DDoS protection and he's just letting it happen, so in order to buy and download the game, you have to wait for him to open the shop for about 15 minutes at a time then get it closed again... Stupid, but what can you do?
If you can get around to buying it, it's worth a shot.
Cube World is a sandbox, completely open and procedurally generated RPG that feels like something you'd get if you crossed Minecraft with a dungeon crawler. Costs about 15 Euros to participate in the Alpha. All character data is saved locally, not serverside, so nothing's wiped as the alpha continues.
The entire game is done in big chunky voxels and it looks pretty good, but also seems to completely hammer the crap out of whatever CPU power you've got going. This struggles at the moment on low power CPUs, much more so than Minecraft.
You can pick from a handful of different races (Lizardmen are awesome!) and the 4 classes Warrior, Mage, Ranger and Rogue. Each class can specialise in one of two different skill trees that change the way you play.
It's initially very confusing, so trying to explain it from a newbie's perspective is probably gonna be just as confusing...
You're effectively dumped in the middle of a randomly generated map, with no tutorial, no guidance as to what you're doing. Just a 'here you go, you're level 1, have some starting equipment and press F1 for controls'. It explains NOTHING to you. What you're supposed to do, game content, crafting systems, none of it.
You can explore the map. Find caves that house mineral deposits such as Iron or Silver, maybe even Emerald, Ruby and Diamond if you're lucky. You can take these minerals to a town and use them in crafting armour, weapons, amulets, etc.
You can stumble across random areas of interest such as dungeons or catacombs (This reminded me a LOT of Oblivion, randomly going around and finding these areas then raiding them for loot).
You can do missions. On your map, you'll see a crossed swords icon appear over certain locations. Going to these areas and killing the designated bosses will give you an experience bonus, and some platinum coins which you can use in town to adjust your gear and bring it up (or even down!) to your current level. At the moment, this is bugged, and adjusting items to your level requires an absolutely insane and impossible amount of platinum coins, so hopefully this'll be one of the first bugs fixed in the alpha.
Levelling your character is very, very strange... First off, there are an infinite amount of levels, but you don't get infinitely powerful. You have a character level, and a 'power level' that goes between 1 and 100. All equipment requirements are based on class and power level, not character level. Each time you level up, you get 2 skill points to add to your skill tree.
Levelling works the exact opposite you'd expect it to. Levelling from 1 to 2 is very slow, but then it starts slowly getting faster, and faster as you progress. The more you level up, the easier it is to level up (to an extent). Power gain from levelling is logarithmic, as opposed to exponential. Your first few levels, you'll increase in power rating very quickly, but as you start to progress through later levels, it can take quite a few before you see your next power rating go up.
Level 1 to 2 for example, will put you from Power 1 to Power 6.
To get to Power 100, you need to reach level 1300+
Skills gain in exactly the same way. The first few points are very effective but then you get diminishing returns. It takes something along the lines of 150,000 skill points into pet riding to get the maximum benefit. That's level 75,000 if you did nothing but level pet riding.
Finding a place suitable for your power level is easy, and even if you're partying with a Level 1, with Level 300's, you'll still be able to play together and level together at a suitable difficulty for everyone. The map will procedurally generate dungeons and mobs that are of both level 300, and level 1 variety, as well as in-between, but if you discover an area that's too hard (Mobs above your level also regularly spawn), you can level up then return to it to tackle later.
It takes a while to click, but when it does, it's extremely addictive. My partner, my friend and I all roll together on a private server as a Warrior, Ranger and Mage combo (healing mage!), constantly gear chasing and boss destroying with increasing difficulty. The fast levelling keeps things interesting and makes progressing through later levels very fun. You just have a bit of a rough start is all.
The usual gear system is in - White commons, Green uncommons, Blue rares, Purple super rares, and Golden legendaries (as well as red uniques, but I don't think these are implemented right now).
You can also customise your weapons, which is REALLY neat and also increases it's power. A longsword for example has room for 32 additional voxels to be placed on it (Iron Nuggets found via mining caves), so you can change the look and come up with some really awesome designs. Each additional voxel placed slightly increases the power.
Bosses also drop 'Spirits', which are coloured voxels that add different buffs such as lifesteal or fire damage.
It's effectively a dungeon crawler without limitations or barriers. Log on, level up, play with friends, tame a pet, go ride it, do some hang gliding, go exploring and find a giant ocean, go sailing in it with your boat, and you're always progressing.
Unfortunately, the official site is being hammered with a DDoS attack and has been for days since it launched. For some reason the developer doesn't seem interested in accepting people's offers of help for DDoS protection and he's just letting it happen, so in order to buy and download the game, you have to wait for him to open the shop for about 15 minutes at a time then get it closed again... Stupid, but what can you do?
If you can get around to buying it, it's worth a shot.