A few months ago, I had the pleasure of joining Australian developers ‘RDBK Studios’ for a hands-on play session of their upcoming title, ‘Renown’. Although this play session was brief, I was left feeling the bitterness of defeat and an eagerness to see how my own journey from peasant to siege master would play out. That wait is finally over. ‘Renown’, developed and published by ‘RDBK Studios’, has now entered early access on Steam.

In ‘Renown’, the open world is your battlefield, and only the strongest will rule. Gather resources, build sprawling castles, and lead your clan into battle against rival players. Whether you’re crafting siege engines to crush enemy walls, clashing swords in intense duels, or rallying your neighbours to destroy your enemies, prove your strength and become truly renowned. Given that this title is an online PvP survival game, there is no story campaign to speak of, which, in all honesty, is a little disappointing given how well the open world has been put together.

Before you go diving into the game and causing as much mayhem as you possibly can, there are a few key things that you should consider before you load into a server. Upon loading the game and selecting ‘Play’ from the top left tab of the menu, players will need to choose from a list of servers on which they will play.

Now, this may not seem like a significant decision for most, but given the highly competitive nature of this title, I would recommend playing on a server with the lowest possible ping for your connection. For players who wish to play with friends from across the pond, their options become somewhat limited due to ping restrictions on connections with high pings.

Thankfully, the devs have got your backs here and have wound up some additional servers that have these ping limits removed. While I do find it comforting to be able to join some of my friends from overseas, I found myself in a whole world of hurt when it came to fighting against other players, with my high ping rendering me all but useless. Even though I could still be of some benefit by taking on more menial tasks like hunting and gathering resources, it just didn’t seem worth it to play and suffer with the high pings.

Starting out, new players are introduced to the sprawling open world with a series of tutorial missions that aim to show them the ropes. During these tutorial quests, you will learn the very basics of the survival aspects of the game, teaching you resource gathering, hunting, and crafting. While these quests do get the job done well enough to get you started, there is sadly no combat tutorial to speak of, outside of drawing and shooting your bow and arrows during a hunting quest. Given the fact that you can find yourself being attacked from all sides by enemy players at any given moment, going into the combat system completely blind is a very hard lesson for new players to learn.

While there may be some players out there who would be willing to show noobies the ropes, the people that I happened to come across were extremely quick to end my life, loot my corpse, and fade away into the distance. These encounters were infuriating for a new player like myself, to say the least, leading me to the conclusion that there should definitely be a combat tutorial included. Perhaps the inclusion of a safe zone where new players could practice their duelling skills against an NPC would be enough.

After suffering far too many miserable defeats, I quickly found myself scurrying away to set up my base elsewhere, which was also a task in itself thanks to the brutal catch-up mechanic. This catch-up mechanic gives enemy players a boost to their running speed within a certain distance from you, which allows them to close the gap on unsuspecting players. I learned very quickly that this mechanic only benefits the hunter and forces you to take a stand and fight. A good, solid hour of cat and mouse went by before I managed to get away from my pursuers, and I could finally relocate, farm fresh resources, and rebuild my base.

Having grown weary from being absolutely spanked by my would-be hunters, I decided to try to bolster my own numbers. I was fortunate enough to run across a few fellow players who had also grown tired of being spanked by the same group that had been ganking me. We spent the next couple of hours gearing up and hatching a plan to exact our revenge.

Just as the sounds of swords clashing started to ring out across the battlefield, instead of hearing the cheers of my newfound teammates ringing out as we began to lay waste to our attackers, the cheers turned quickly into jeers as players started to disappear due to disconnection errors. Sadly, for us, this was just the beginning of the issues currently plaguing the game. Reconnecting to the same server became a massive task, often requiring a complete restart of the game. I noticed some players getting stuck in combat animations, and I experienced numerous hard crashes that returned me to my desktop.

In addition to these issues, having to return to the menu frequently for server reboots also caused me a great deal of headaches, especially when it came to our bases. Server reboots only took around 30 seconds before you could reconnect, which seemed fine to begin with; however, spawning back in 30 seconds later to find my base missing walls, doors, and needing lengthy repairs, all without ever being raided, became incredibly frustrating. While I understand that building degradation occurs naturally within the game mechanics, I typically saw much less damage over time while actively playing on the server.

Much to the developer’s credit, updates have already begun to roll out, which have seen many improvements made, including fixes for crashing issues, animation fixes, and an increase in server uptime. Having previous experience in QA testing on other titles, I understand better than most that the road to full release is sometimes an arduous journey for developers. Releasing in an Alpha state is a huge risk that I truly hope pays off for the team.

Visuals are a mixed bag, featuring gorgeous, flowing medieval vistas littered with deer and rabbits to hunt, as well as lovingly crafted points of interest, such as expansive castles and surrounding peasant villages. Vibrant green fields add a very nice splash of colour to the fairly drab medieval landscape. I hope to see an increase in forest density. Right now, it just feels a little bare bones, which I’m sure will continue to be improved upon over time.

I find the backing soundtrack to be quite soothing, and while it is nice to listen to and does a great job blending into the background, I also feel that it doesn’t quite match the chaotic wall of sound that breaks out across the land as sieges erupt. The clash of swords against armour, the whirling and whooshing of arrows raining down from above, and siege horns blasting out as castle gates start to open; these sounds are incredible; however, there are a couple of sounds that just don’t belong here. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a rabbit make the sound of a big game animal like a deer dying before. Sure, it made for a very funny-sounding hunting expedition, but I don’t think that this was at all intended.

‘Renown’ tries very hard to bring the best survival mechanics of games like Rust and fuse them with hardcore physics-based combat, the likes of Chivalry. The potential for this title to be the next survival game of choice is definitely there. Combat is fairly solid, even at this early Alpha stage, and can only get better from here. If you can brave the bugs and issues and want to help shape the future of ‘Renown’, then by all means, pick it up now. The team at RDBK Studios certainly has the vision, and I very much look forward to seeing just how far they can take this title into the future.

Written by: Gary Nielsen