Many years ago, in the TIGSource, there was a competition that had multiple independent developers make a game in 7 days using sprites from an artist named Oryx (I believe he was a winner of a previous competition there) Out of the many games, only stood out among the rest and of course, it was Realm of the Mad God, a MMO/Roguelike game that would break many conventions of the MMO medium itself. Basically it was the fact that is was a bullet hell game with RPG elements and permadeath which isn't exactly new nowadays, but original then.
Over the years it went through many developers, Wildshadow the original creatore, Kablam which shoved in P2W elements and micro transactions up the ass, and now DECA who is like the latter but slightly better.
There have been classes, dungeons, pets, events, battlepasses and many other things that have been added for the game, sometimes for better and then sometimes for worse. The main goal of this game is to reach level 20, which can take up to 30 minutes or less if you know what you're doing, and then after maxing out you then have have to grind stat potions to max out your characters stats. You do this by grinding in the hardest area of the Realm, the dreaded Godlands where a Medusa or Beholder can shotgun you out of nowhere leading to the death of your character, or grind dungeons which after defeating the boss, will drop 1 or 2 stat potions.
Of course there's equipment as well, you got your armor, weapon, special ability and ring, they can appear as a simple tier which means the higher they are, the more effective they will be. Then there's UT items which are not tiered but can lead you to specific playstyles, like a Warrior with better ranger or a Wizard with better DPS. There's many tiers of loot you can get as well depending on the color of the bag with White bags being the best
Some may drop potions, others may drop loot, maybe for your class or another one, which means you may have to storage your items. BTW, you get some free vault space when you start up, but you can pay in game currency (Fame) or real currency to expand it, and if you plan on going deep in this game it may be best if you do that... Because like I said, once you die, everything is gone... Except your pets
So pets are pretty much your little assistant that can either support you with healing or attack foes depending on what skills they had when they hatched. Thing is, you have to feed them to make them useful, and of course theirs tiers, common, uncommon, rare, legendary and Divine. You also have to upgrade your pet park for each tier, and feeding your pet, fusing your pet and upgrading your pet costs either fame or real money. And trust me, the prices for in game currency skyrockets fast. The most popular skills for pets are, heal, magic heal and electric or decoy, so if you want a pet with those stats, you better get grinding in the Godlands for eggs.
So I mentioned fame as in game currency, how do you get fame? Well when you reach level 20, you XP meter gets replaced with a fame meter, depending on what dungeons or events you do, you get a certain amount of fame. BUT, heres the catch, you can't use that fame until that character your playing as dies to then the game tallies your results and then gives you your fame.
In terms of dungeons, they can start mind numbingly easy to batshit insane hard to needing a discord group to survive or else you're fucked. This is where this game's biggest problems lies, to reach the endgame stuff has you grinding many dungeons to get rare loot (mostly white bag tier stuff), max out your character by grinding stat potions and finding groups to go with you in endgame areas, which only appear after event bosses (Because you NEED a party for those areas, don't you dare do it solo). Also, if you die, you have to start over from level 1 with tier 0 equipment, TIME TO GET GRINDING AGAIN. Get to level 20, max out stat potions, get good quality tier items and then look for a group (or a discord if you don't like fun) to have another chance. Losing maxed out characters reapetly on the final dungeons because of the brutal strict difficult has driven me and many other to the brink of insanity. It even makes me questions this mixup of genres and if it even works at all.
So the title is called Realm of the Mad God, who is the Mad God exactly? It's this dude named Oryx who's some evil guy who gets shitfaced in his wine cellar and makes everyone miserable or something. There's barely a story here although there is lore, but honestly that's not why your'e here. The main goal of the game other than making your character stronger, is to defeath Oryx's general. Who are his generals? Is it the mighty Sphinx, the Cube God, THE AVATAR OF THE FORGOTTEN KING!? No, it's a bunch of low level ents, necromancers and Lichs...
Anyway, after defeating a bunch of underwhelming enemies, the entire map and part of the server get teleported to Oryx's castle which has you battling his forces and then the mad god himself! After defeating him and crossing your fingers for decent loot, you have the option of fighting him again in his wine cellar (which was rare to do back in the day, but since this game is fueled by whales now, his wine celler is now almost a gives after the first fight) There you fight him a second time in a drunken stupor but he's way harder and many player deaths were had. After that fight, you get a bunch of bullshit where you now need 3 maguffins to get to the true final boss arena. And you better be prepared for it, because the third Oryx fight is the most brutal fight in the game even with a great party.
And if you die with the character you have been building up for weeks, you better have another maxed out character or else you are starting over from scratch...
Sounds fun right? and btw, this is not even the hardest dungeon, it's the Shatters which I haven't bothered to check out yet
Also there's this seasonal character thing where you make a separate character, you get a boost for XP for your battlepass and a bigger vault to start out with, but as soon as the season ends, your character becomes normal and unless you looted everything from your gift chest, you lose that stuff as well, also your chest is back to being tiny unless you upgraded it with fame or real money... You also get unique missions like doing certain dungeons and doing certain objectives, so at least there's some incentive. The seasonal stuff is a divisive aspect to the community I just found out.
Also there is a certain problem of finding groups, you first have to find a crowded server, then when you find a dungeon, cross your fingers you have at least one or two people to go with you because they majority of people are in the Nexus waiting for whales to spend their mom's credit car... I mean hard earned dosh to buy keys for hard dungeons so they can drop them in the safe area. So, that kind of kills incentive for going into the Realm to explore a dungeons when somebody can just drop one in the starting area. Then there's Discords which I keep mentioning to do the endgame stuff, but you need certain requirements to get in like certain tier level equipment and I've heard some bad stories about those.
Gonna be honesty, I kind of fucking hate this game, but I can't stop playing it. But I heard they are going to do something called Realm Rework where they make the game world more interesting and make it better for newcomers, so I suggest avoiding this game until that comes out later this year.
Anybody else get into this game?
