SpiritVale, a promising free MMO inspired by classic RPGs, suffers a rough early access launch

SpiritVale, an old-school-type MMORPG with various skill trees, customizations, classes, jobs, and sub-specializations, just launched in early access, and it opened with mostly negative reviews (15- 38%) on Steam in the first 12 hours.

While it has bad reviews now, its demo actually held a 93% positive rating on Steam, showing great potential through its wide customization and variety of classes.

However, a lot of things went wrong in its early access launch state, and the reviews are completely justified. Here’s what happened.

SpiritVale Opens With Unsurprising Server Issues

Like most MMORPGs at launch, players always want to speedrun through the leveling process and play as soon as the servers go live. While there are other aspects to be excited about in an MMORPG like the story, side quests, customization, exploration, and more, there’s always that need to be “on pace” and complete your player to experience the endgame, where it is all about seeing your character at its full potential.

So, when everyone started playing SpiritVale at launch, it wasn’t as shocking to see the servers couldn’t handle the volume, even if the game only opened with around 15,000 concurrent players. Players were experiencing server lag, severe ping spikes, login issues, and crashes.

Only a few players experienced a smooth playthrough. However, even that didn’t go as planned for some, as there was a rollback that reversed the progress of thousands of players, with some even complaining they lost 20+ levels.

Server issues feel like a staple for these types of games, so let’s try looking outside these problems to other things that caused negative reviews.

SpiritVale’s Glaring Problems (There Are Too Many)

First, there are massive issues with how areas or maps are designed to hold around 30 players. With such a small area and so many random players, there aren’t enough monsters, which is quite common in other MMORPGs, but there have been a lot of features that have fixed this problem in other games, such as having separate instances for a smaller number of players, faster respawn, and higher enemy density.

There are even instances where nothing at all spawns. Yeah, my first experience was running around the starting level 1-5 area seeing absolutely nothing for 15 minutes.

Second, bugs were almost everywhere. There were movement issues. You could use the left mouse button on the ground to move, or use WASD to move around. However, at times only WASD movement works unless you dodge roll with the space bar, and it fixes itself until it breaks again.

Third, the lack of direction compounded with server issues hurts the experience. SpiritVale doesn’t have a questline, and you are free to do whatever you want. So, when you go through all the bugs and server issues, you get more lost even if the progression system is a bit straightforward. Go to a map based on your level and keep moving to other maps as you level up. If you get stuck with issues in specific maps, you really have no choice but to restart the instance, wait, or try to learn more about your class. The game doesn’t have tutorials, so it’s hard to keep up with itemization and your skill trees.

Lastly, the game is almost unplayable solo. You’ll encounter bosses where you really must party with other players. Other classes also find it hard to level on their own, so playing with others is a massive benefit. It isn’t a big problem for an MMO to encourage multiplayer activities, but it gets hard to find a party with the game’s UI being bare-bones. It could be an issue exclusive to my region, SEA, since the language barrier is more prominent in this region.

Overall, though, I found SpiritVale to not be worth the download, even though I had high hopes for it. It certainly needs more time to cook, and I sure hope the devs can sort this one out. Until then, hard pass for me.