Eternal Tombs Is A Bland Mess of Bugs and Bloom Effects – Pre-Alpha Impressions
Eternal Tombs, developed by Triune Studios, ventures into the sandbox MMO arena with a distinctive twist—live Tomb Masters. These staff members, as explained on their official website, dynamically influence player experiences by creating unique events tailored to solo, group, guild, and server-wide play.
In its current pre-alpha phase, Eternal Tombs exhibits the typical roughness expected from an early build, especially from an indie team, but still, having played the pre-alpha during the weekend, I don’t see how it is ever going to survive in today’s MMO market.
The game features a lineup of classes with unconventional names such as Chloromancer, Bonestitcher, and Bombardier. This choice suggests an attempt by Triune Studios to distinguish their game through elaborate terminology. While it’s fine to deviate from the typical Warrior, Paladin, and Priest classes, the traditional titles are grounded in recognizable roles and histories. For instance, a Necromancer, defined by Wikipedia as one who practices magic to commune with the dead for divination, and a Druid, known historically as a revered figure in ancient Celtic cultures encompassing roles from religious leadership to medical practice, both provide players with an immediate sense of class identity and purpose. In contrast, names like Manipulator or Bombardier lack this instant recognition, making it harder for players to connect with and fully understand their chosen class’s role within the game world.
The graphics, powered by Unreal Engine 5, follow the bland visual trends of other recent indie MMOs like Mortal Online 2, Abyss Online, Life is Feudal, Past, Fate, Reign of Guilds, The Quinfall, or Embers Adrift (I could go on), with a reliance on pre-purchased assets that sometimes feel mismatched within the game’s environment. The screenshots below are all from different games.
Most of these games, including Eternal Tombs, state that they are inspired by classic MMOs. This makes little sense judging by the visuals as old MMOs almost always had unique or stylized graphics. Compare EverQuest, Runescape, World of Warcraft, Ultima Online, Rangarok Online, or Final Fantasy XI and all these games stand out in graphics with their own unique look.
The general look and feel of the game world also feels very mismatched and many areas feel out of place, likely because I have a strong suspicion that store-bought assets have been heavily utilized.
It also seems like Eternal Tombs is attempting to cast a very wide net while also being a game that caters to a rather small niche, the hardcore sandbox MMOer. The game attempts to offer PvE and PvP gameplay, crafting, harvesting, pet collecting, and survival elements, along with the inclusion of over 20 raids and the innovative Tomb Master feature at launch. All this on a box game price with an optional subscription model, a monetization model that almost no other modern MMO has been able to survive on, makes me wonder if these Tomb Masters are either AI or remote workers at some call center.
Upon starting the character creator, problems with the UI immediately stand out. There is also no info about the classes and since they have unconventional names, you have to guess a bit what each does. I chose Warlord as it was the only name that was self-explanatory, along with the Ranger.
The characters look fine, and the character creator is serviceable. Only having humans as a race is another trend amongst indie MMOs that adds to the blandness of an already bland feeling world.
On entering the game, the UI goes from bad to worse, which is made evident as a tutorial window pops open and you are unable to move until you click through the tutorial. Eternal Tombs has opted for a forced mouse look, which makes sense for an action-combat MMO, at least if it is made for console play, but makes very little sense for a classic-inspired MMO. Like with the tutorial window, your character is unable to move at all if you open your inventory or any interface window, which again makes sense for a console game.
The initial introduction upon entering the game to the game’s antagonist, Dragnorox, adds a narrative hook and is one of the few positives in Eternal Tombs. However, It’s also a bit strange for a sandbox game to try to push the same narrative upon every player with a main storyline. Don’t want to be a “follower of Triune” fighting against Dragnorox? Well tough, that’s your identity, and also, everyone’s identity.
While having voice acting at all in a pre-alpha indie MMO is commendable, the overall storytelling and voice acting vary a lot in quality. Take a look at the example text from one of the introduction quests:
Excellent – You have done great. Now being a good Meatflesher is a pretty rare talent and their work is worth more than the largest sums of plat, but you can at least get the basics to keep yourself healthy. Go ahead and eat it when we’re done here. It’ll strengthen you to kill some of these nasty creatures. Now I want to talk to you about something incredibly important. I know you’ve heard it all your life, but now that you are learning to fight, it will be more tempting to give in, especially when you are in the most dire of circumstances. NEVER and I mean this seriously, NEVER summon magic from within yourself. (The text goes on about Dragnorox, Deathseekers, Runestones, Fusing, the Tradeport and Weapons. It is so long that it doesn’t even fit within the text box of the game.)
I’m sorry, what? What’s a Meatflesher? And again with the unconventional names, just say butcher. The only reason I know what plat is is because I played EverQuest and know that it is short for platinum. I can get the basics of “what” to keep myself healthy? Being a Meatflesher? Then the segue from talking about eating a rat meat kebab into an ominous warning about NEVER using magic. The writing is all over the place, putting it mildly.
While playing the game, there is also one big glaring issue, literally glaring. Eternal Tombs suffers from an excessive bloom effect that makes everything overly bright. At random times, the lighting will change and turn darker and more moody. At the same time as this happened, a big dragon spawned and one-shotted me in the tutorial area, making me think the lighting effects are to signify a mood change during events, but that is just me guessing. It also might be that a random high-level dragon spawned and the lighting changes randomly as none of this was explained in any way in the game.
On the gameplay front, combat is hindered by awkward animations and erratic enemy behaviors. After killing my first enemy, I made an educated guess that “F” was the loot button, so I pressed “F” and it did indeed open the inventory of the dead mob, I pressed “F” again and the loot window closed making me think I have successfully looted the mob. I had not. Looting is done by right-clicking each item individually. Having thought I had looted the item though I ran back to the quest giver, and even without the item in your inventory, quest givers show the same dialogue window with a button to turn in the quest even if you don’t have the required items. This prompted me to spam the quest givers dialog about 15 times, him saying “You have the rat meat do you? and me clicking “I do” (the only available option) until I realized that I did not have the rat meat.
These problems are compounded by a quest journal that struggles to effectively convey objectives clearly. The quest journal only shows the quest dialogue from the quest giver, which often is a wall of text too big to even fit in the text window, filled with fluff text that has nothing to do with the quest. Combining this with the mouse-look interface can prove very frustrating, as with all the other interface windows, opening the journal will hinder your character from being able to move, and you will have to find a safe spot to stand still if you want to read your quest journal. In Old School MMOs, having long quest dialogues or little to no journal wasn’t a huge problem as there often weren’t many quests, but in a game with a quest-based leveling system, this becomes tiring.
Action combat wasn’t yet a thing back in the old-school days, but Eternal Tombs has decided to stray yet again from their classic inspiration, and with the combat, they have made it difficult for themselves. Action-combat is very easy to implement in a game, but it’s very hard to make a good action-combat system, even for AAA titles. Attacks need to feel like they have weight to them, the hitboxes have to be just right, and enemy behaviors need to function well. Eternal Tombs does none of this, yet at least. As I was grinding mobs I tried to save my cooldowns for the beginning of a new fight to quickly take down mobs, but the mobs would often turn around as I pressed the attack and I would waste the attack as I would just miss the hitbox.
After doing a few introductory quests, I was sent to “fuse” my weapon, but the fusing process bugged out every time and I was left unable to continue the main quest. I decided to go into the world to attempt some side quests or just to explore a bit but turns out that around level 4, mobs suddenly become too powerful to handle alone, and I was killed by most mobs my level. Packs of random animals would also pile on me, killing me in an instant, along with that high-level dragon from earlier which would spawn and also kill me. This quickly deleveled me back to level 3 and I was stuck in a sort of limbo between levels 3 and 4.
As an EverQuest fan I don’t mind harsh death penalties or even deleveling, but dying over and over and deleveling from level 4 to 3 is annoying. Eternal Tombs feels harsh just for the sake of being harsh. Old-school MMOs could also be harsh but there was a balance most of the time. The world around you could be unforgiving, but there was always a path forward as long as you were careful. I could probably have pushed through and gotten a few more levels in Eternal Tombs, but at this point, the game was starting to feel like a chore.
If you want to play a classic MMO, go do that. If you want to play an open-world MMO with harvesting and crafting, action combat, PvE, and PvP, I would just go play New World, The Elder Scrolls Online, or Black Desert Online.
