[Review] Life is Feudal: MMO

Here we have yet another example of a game that mistakes grittiness for realism, this time in a medieval setting. The Massively Multiplayer Online version of Life is Feudal, is so determined to feel ‘hardcore’ that it fails to be entertaining on a moment-to-moment level. 

Anyone who’s seen the TV series Vikings will already have a clear idea of the tone this game is aiming for. If you haven’t seen the show, the opening cutscene will quickly get you up to speed. Narrated by Sean Bean, these pencil-sketched images present a vague backstory — the fall of a golden era and the corruption and desolation that followed, forcing you to seek out Abella, the possibly cursed island where the game takes place. If this piques your interest, don’t hold your breath. This game is a true sandbox and features almost no narrative outside of the direction and goals you bring to the table.

This MMO has a storied history to it. Originally launching in 2017, its servers were closed down around three years later due to contract trouble with the publisher. The rights eventually changed hands and the latest incarnation of Life is Feudal was relaunched in June 2023. While the Steam Page calls it “Free to Play”, you won’t be able to load into the game without first paying for a subscription. 

 

Loading into the tutorial, I am greeted by familiar faces of the survival genre, trees to chop, tools to craft and food to gather. What I wasn’t prepared for was how difficult each of these tasks would be. There’s a very strong sense of simulation to the mechanics. Mining requires meticulously surveying for ore deposits before you even break ground. The simulation adds to the realism and there was something satisfying about gazing down a completed mineshaft, but this approach made every task take that much longer which took away from the enjoyment.

The tutorial is woefully under-equipped to teach you how to engage with several of its systems. For example, in learning to build a shack, the tutorial prompt just asks you to build one. There is no in-game explanation on how to acquire the necessary materials from wooden planks, or how to level the ground to build on it. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure it out before I gave up and logged out in frustration (and this wasn’t the only time that the game drove me to quitting). The only thing I learned from my troubles was that this is a game that will be vastly more entertaining if you play with the wiki open at all times.

There is a counselor system to help make learning easier, where new players can reach out to experienced players who opt into the system. Taking them under their wing, they can respond to any messages you may have in game. It also includes the option for counselors to include external contact information, like their discord. I reached out to several of them when I first started, but I never heard anything back and, while I like the idea, it feels shady.Offloading the work of onboarding newcomers onto the player base rather than redesigning the tutorial could be argued to be exploitative, especially when said players are paying a monthly subscription for the experience. In an era of increasing anti-consumer practices, there’s a subtle air of subscription farming, with minimal effort, that left a sour taste in my mouth.

Character progression was another area that felt needlessly opaque. You don’t have a character level like a lot of MMOs— instead almost every action you take feeds into one of several ability scores that passively grow your character as you play. This is progression by a thousand tiny steps as a single increase was only around 0.009, at the higher end of things. I had my suspicions playing the tutorial and the main game confirmed my fears— achieving anything in this game requires a significant grind. Farming for materials can take hours, especially if you want to take the added time to find higher-quality sources. For example, every tree has an individual quality rating, ranging from one to one hundred, with higher qualities producing more planks. It would be perfectly possible to sink an entire day into finding the perfect trees, collecting their saplings and replanting them to create an efficient source of wood. A tough investment, but one that would set you up well for the long game. This is how the game tries to mandate playing together with others. One player sets up a perfect timber yard and another smiths high-quality weapons and tools using the ores mined up by a third player. This approach is reinforced by the fact that you can’t gain access to all of the high-level skills across a single character. 

It also means that playing through this game solo is quite limiting. It’s certainly doable— you can build a small home and a basic plot of farmland. But if you want to experience any of the late-game content, then delving into the multiplayer aspects of the game is mandatory. To help facilitate all of this cooperation, the game has the option to create and join guilds that allow players to band together into factions. This allows interaction with workstations placed by your fellow guildsmen and larger guilds can claim larger portions of land for their members. 

In theory, this should facilitate several larger factions competing against one another. This could lead to entire wars built around player agency, making it a very EVE Online style of MMO. Life is Feudal includes the ability to get into a formation such as a phalanx, with other players joining in making the benefits of the formation even more powerful. It’s the sort of system that you dreamed about as a kid with only one small problem: the game is currently lacking the player base to even come close to making this dream a reality. 

The game features text chat support, with multiple rooms available for you to drop in and out of at a moment’s notice.In all my time playing Life is Feudal, I very rarely saw these used for anything other than a new player asking for clarification on a niche mechanic. In fact, I barely saw another player at all in my time running around the snowcap hillsides. It’s a shame because a thriving ecosystem could help make this game much more engaging on a moment-to-moment basis and help water down some of the tedium.  

Though I may not have seen other places, there were signs of them littered throughout the map. Orchards, with trees painstakingly organized in rows. Sprawling complexes of smitheries, smelters and tanners. I came across mines and logging camps and scattered hovels, all of which were empty. Often, it felt more like I was playing an apocalyptic survival game than a feudal simulator and this wasn’t helped by the sheer scale of the world map. Whilst the graphics aren’t anything to write home about, there is an impressive sense of scale, with coastlines that stretch out into the horizon and mountains that truly tower over the space. Standing on a mountainside and looking out across the landscape granted a sense of insignificance that highlighted how devoid of life the server was.

Between the grinding and the focus on barren social gameplay, this is not a game to be played casually. If you have friends to jump in with, then there’s enough depth to its systems to find some enjoyment— provided the slow establishment of a basecamp is enough to sate your appetite. My experiences entering this game alone makes it very difficult to recommend since the survival crafting genre is so densely populated and there’s nothing unique about Life is Feudal that makes it worth the required investment.