u/Kevadu

Matchmaking is literally just timing out for me. Can't even find a group.

So I actually got into the playtest and gave it a shot today. The good news: it was functional today. I actually logged in without issue and was able to play it.

That's it for the good news...

OK, to be fair it's obviously not ready for release anytime soon but the game is absolutely riddled with bugs. I had NPCs who were necessary for quests just not render and I wondered around blindly until the option to engage in dialogue with the invisible NPC appeared. The game looks like it's 20 years old which would be OK except somehow there were still significant frame drops at times even on my PC which should be incredibly overpowered for this (9800x3D and 7900XTX). Character customization was basically non-existent (to be fair I think what was there was just a placeholder).

But some rough spots are expected. What really killed the experience for me was just how bad the combat felt. It's a pretty standard tab target system only with the baffling change that you have to manually input all your basic attack as well. I enjoy full action combat when you control everything but this feels out of place in a tab target system. Even though you have to do the basic attack manually you can't actually do it if an enemy isn't targeted so what's the point?

Speaking of targeting, I found that to be a serious issue. The mouse cursor was small and occasionally difficult to see and mobs would dart around as they seemed to change targets as random. Which all combined to make the simple act of clicking on an enemy to target it feel way more awkward than it should. It's also not always obvious when you have an enemy selected if there's grass or other terrain around because there's only a thin circle around them that's close to the ground.

On top of all that enemies would often stack on top of each other or even your own character because there's seemingly no collision detection at all. If there are multiple enemies of the same type it could be incredibly hard to even tell which one you were targeting.

OK, so besides the server issues, bugs, performance issues, manual basic attacks, and bad targeting how is the game? Well for the most part it just felt soulless. The setting is bland, the writing is bland, the visuals are bland, the combat is bland.

I made the comparison to Chrono Odyssey because as janky as its beta was I was still able to enjoy it because it had some interesting new ideas and the combat was decent. Scars is just as janky but it's also not fun to play either.

Maybe they can fix all this stuff eventually but this game still needs years of work. Supposedly they're targeting Q4 2026 but that seems totally unrealistic to me.