PIONER Early Access Impressions: Strong Open World Survival, Weak MMO Elements

Have you ever been to a Thanksgiving or large gathering where whoever is bringing a staple dish, one you really thought couldn't be messed up, and somehow the dish just tastes off? Feels like everyone has at least one story of a dish where, after eating, you go, man, they had all the right ideas but the final product just failed. This feeling is what recently overcame me during my time playing PIONER, the new MMO FPS from GFAGAMES.

PIONER takes the rough and gritty resource management, crafting, and status management from the survival genre, throws in an excellent and vibrant open world, a dash of a story that does just enough to hook you in, and then inexplicably decides to garnish it with the awkwardness of an MMO. Alright enough of the food metaphors but the point remains, as a MMO fan who has been playing them since 2007, it's been well known that the once popular genre has faded in recent years.

MMO Curse Continues

Unfortunately for PIONER, this curse has been passed on. During my travels, I saw a small handful of players in the main hub. While out exploring the Rogue Wastelands, I never ran into a single player. Not to mention that often time quests that you encounter in the open world will swap the game to a single-player mode. At no point did I feel like the positives that come with MMOs were there. The downsides, though, often clogged up my experience, several minutes plus long loading screens staring at the phrase, connecting to a server, or the dreaded search for an open server. While the multiplayer aspect of exploring the open doom-trodden world seems appealing, that can easily be solved with multiplayer co-op over a mass world experience that, at least for me, was lacking.

PIONER sets out with the protagonist waking up with “limited memory.” You can pick your background. However, it did not seem to have an impact on stats as you might expect. From there you learn more about your surroundings on the island you inhabit. With a mysterious blue pulse in the sky causing chaos and forcing the remaining survivors to band together for survival. While most MMOs lock players into a specific class or style, PIONER lets the player decide their own path.

Choose Your Own Path

How you want to trek the island is up to you. As a mercenary, a bandit, a caravan guard, an explorer, or a pioneer, most likely as a combination of all of them, the way you route out and shape the island is up to you. Just keep an eye out for the anomalies that keep popping up across the world, as much as you can with your eyes on the ground trying to grab any scrap of ammo or food you can to stay alive.

As I alluded to earlier, PIONER has all the making of an excellent open-world survival RPG. It even made sure to include the always popular in-world card game, round of gwent anyone? In what is a very interesting tic-tac-toe style game, players place cards on a 3x3 grid. Each card has arrows in one or more of the cardinal directions, and if played next to another card, the one with the most arrows wins the “battle” and gives that player control of both cards. The end goal is simple: control the largest number of cards on the board after they have been filled up.

GFAGAMES was very smart to place the tutorial for Carnage, as the game is called, immediately in the starting hub after beating the tutorial. Arriving with a mere 300 hexes, the currency in the game, I immediately accepted the 100 hex starter deck from the NPC and signed up for the intro tournament, and then was broke after losing and retrying. The game does an amazing job of detail. The main tower where you get your first major quest has three arcade-style games you can play, if you have the coin. Not something I expected to see after climbing up the staircase of a hastily built tower.

Another excellent touch early in the game, perhaps the most important part of any game, is the level of choice given to the player. Heading into the first mission, PIONER lets the player decide if they want to craft a sawed-off shotgun or fix up an old pistol for your weapon of choice heading into the Rogue Wastelands. With only two weapon slots, and a melee weapon always useful with ammo so tight, it was refreshing to be offered a choice. Though I did find an SMG later on in a bunker that ended up being my go-to weapon.

With a variety of skill trees to pick from, while small for now, each had only five skill nodes in total, being able to craft a journey that was unique to me is always a nice touch. For now, I have put all of my points into weapon crafting, figuring a chance to refund materials very important in the early slog of survival games where every resource counts.

My only real issue with the weapon system was the lack of choice when it came to your loadout. You are limited to only four total hot swap spots. With only two being weapons, one locked for throwables and the last for medical supplies. At times, I found it frustrating to not be able to run my pistol and SMG at the same time, as a melee weapon you get in the tutorial feels almost required when ammo supplies run low. Since the game plays like an MMO, there is no pausing and going into the menu leaves you vulnerable to the enemy NPCS, and cost me my first life.

As with any early access game, bug fixing is almost more important than churning out content. My first play session was hamstrung by dynamics and lag that made the game feel unplayable at times, but the recent round of maintenance patches seems to have cleared it up when I hopped back on. While I did have issues with a reloading bug that prevented me from reloading guns until swapping weapons, it was not serious enough to drive me away.

For now, I think PIONER has a great setting, the open world feels alive, with NPCs chatting just enough to make the world feel alive, and the survival identity being a nice touch rarely seen in an open-world setting. As with any MMO, the overall population is paramount to the game's greater success. This is one of the few MMOs that really do feel like they are best played as just a co-op and does not suffer as much from a lack of players in the open world as others in the genre usually do. I would highly recommend anyone with a love of crafting survival, who wants a bit more freedom than a one map fits all experience to check out PIONER.