Fun but needs (armour) polish

Otago Daily Times

4 days ago

I was recently given the opportunity to have a quick look at an alpha-build of a new game called Renown, alongside a small play session with Australian developers RDBK Studios.
Renown is an open world crafting and base-building game, which seem like a dime a dozen nowadays. It manages to separate itself though with its main draw of combat, which is aligned more with medieval arena fighters. It also shuns some other basic survival mechanics like food and thirst. This is a pretty neat concept and I was interested by that alone.
As with other games of this type, there is no story — just a world in which you and other players can forge your own path, which has never personally interested me, but as we can see in the popularity of games like Rust, certainly has fans.
Those who have played games like MORDHAU or the Chivalry series will be right at home with the combat. You can swing your weapon from left, right, overhead, and make stabs. There's parries, feints and morphs, and for the more technically knowledgeable out there, they also have accels and drags and your physical hitbox moves with your mouse, so you can duck under sword blows. For those who want a ranged option, there's plenty of bows and arrows to turn others into human pincushions.
Hitboxes did seem a little off, especially against bots. Attacking someone from behind just seemed to fail all the time, and sometimes attacks seemed to phase into opponents or miss. It worked fine when I tried some old-fashioned fisticuffs against other players though, so maybe this is a skill issue on my end or something specific to bots.
Crafting is fairly simple. You gather resources from the surroundings using tools or fists, then open the crafting menu and get to it. It's added to a queue so you can walk around doing other things while it all finishes in the background. You can also build workshops, like a forge to smelt those gold coins you find into gold ingots, used in the research tree to unlock more crafting recipes.
The play session itself ran rather smoothly as we were shown around some player-built structures, from small huts to towering castles, which the devs say won't take an excessively long time to build. After that there was a small attack vs defence raid which the defence team — which I was on — handily lost. Then there was some building of simple huts and some small player scuffles before the session wrapped up. Altogether, I was rather impressed by what I saw. It wasn't perfect by a long shot but clearly something that passionate people had built.
I'm not sure about the game's concept of a maintenance tax, essentially an expanding drain on resources to keep your buildings alive. Basically, this puts a theoretical cap on building size, as eventually you won't be able to support the drain. On the plus side, it keeps large clans from just building a massive base while not locking out smaller clans or solo players from building. In my personal testing, tossing a few stacks of wood in would keep my little shack going for several days.
It's an early alpha build so there is clearly a lot to be done. The interactions you can make with the world felt obtuse for no reason. You use Q and R to scroll up and down a list, but R for some reason opens the crafting menu by default! Why not just use the scroll wheel? It was really janky and I never got used to it. You could also rotate items in the inventory using the same R button. It's mad!
Of course, no early access game is without a bug or 10 and Renown is no exception. For some reason, items got stuck in my inventory and I was unable to move or drop them, so they just took up space forever. I somehow dislocated my arm in game and was unable to do anything until the kind player I was beating in a fight punched me out of it.
My personal opinion is that Renown has a solid foundation but needs a lot of polish before release. So far, its neat concept and fun combat are covered with a layer of strange jank and an unpolished sheen. But clearly, the devs just want players to build big castles and smash armies together and have fun. I can deeply respect that.
Renown is slated for early access release on PC in Q3 2025.
By Michael Robertson