What is Brighter Shores?
Brighter Shores is a new free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game by the original creator of RuneScape, Andrew Gower. In it, you take on the role of a town guard of the town Hopeport, but are quickly given free rein to explore the town and surrounding areas. While exploring the area, there will be some quests to do, things to kill, items to gather, fish to catch, food to cook, and potions to make, among other things. While there will be comparisons to RuneScape, it does seem distinct enough to justify playing it instead of RuneScape.
Gameplay
Much like RuneScape, Brighter Shores is a point-and-click fantasy MMO. To move around, click on the screen to the tile you want to go to or click on the map (up to two rooms away). To attack, click on an enemy NPC. To gather something, click on the item you want to gather. You get the idea. Overall, this is a solid gameplay loop, simple enough to learn, but complicated enough to keep me invested in the game. There's not much else to say about the gameplay. I wonder how much this will compete when compared to RuneScape because if it is too similar, people might not decide to play it, but if it is too different, that audience won't be tempted to try it out.
So far, in my ~6 hours of playtime, my biggest complaint about the gameplay is that I cannot click on the map to easily travel from town to the beach. It makes gathering things a bit more annoying, and I am not sure why it was limited to two rooms. Still, it is better than it was, because the map used to be non-interactive.
Level Design
So far, I've only gotten to the second area/zone of the game, but I have explored most of the areas open to me, and I have some thoughts about the overall level design of the first two areas. When you first start the game, you are in Hopeport, and to me, it feels like only half of a town. When compared to a town or city featured in RuneScape, the town feels complete within the world. There are various shops, banks, and interesting characters, and the cities have a character themselves.
Hopeport on the other hand, has only a small amount of shops - and some of them are just to sell gear (looking at you, quartermaster), but currently, there's no way to buy new weapons and armor, and the items you need to use in order to gather seem overly expensive - I spent maybe 20 minutes or so buying eggs and making omelets to gather enough money to buy a set of shears, maybe I was just doing something wrong, but from my research, I needed higher skills in general to complete quests, so my only other sources of income was gathering items or killing mobs, but that seemed inefficient to me.
The forest that makes up the second zone is a bit better because it is a forest, I don't expect to be able to interact with as many friendly NPCs, and sure enough, I can't. In my exploration, there's a friendly hunter with a cabin that might have something to do later and a friendly dryad that helps us unlock our class archetype (I chose Hammermage, for what it's worth). Everyone and everything else is either passive or an enemy. I like this forest, it feels dense and crowded like an overgrown forest should, and I look forward to progressing through the forest more. Hopefully, I don't have to wait too long to find weapons and armor for the Hammermage that are good in the forest.
Skills
Finally, there are the skills. There are a bunch of skills that get unlocked as you progress to each new area. Each area has its own skills. The town has Guard, Gathering, Fishing, Potion making, and Cooking, while the forest has Scout, Foraging, and Woodcutting, and the future episodes have more skills. Each skill can only be leveled up in the area that they come from - so no leveling up Gathering in the forest, you'll be leveling up Foraging instead. This leads to an interesting (and slightly frustrating) issue: when going to a new area, you essentially start at 0. It doesn't matter if you have a piece of gear that requires level 18 Guard, in Hope Forest, it might as well not exist. This makes me feel like all the time I spent working on skills in the game was a waste as I completed the main storyline, and probably won't change due to it being a fundamental aspect of the game's design. To quote Andrew directly on Steam:
Therefore, we have designed Brighter Shores in a different way. We have gone with what we call the 'breadth and depth' system. It is NOT intended that you first 'finish' episode 1, then go on to episode 2 and never go back to episode 1 ever again.
Instead, it is relatively easy to progress to each new episode (breadth), but even when you have reached the latest episode you are nowhere near finished. Instead, you can at any time choose any of the episodes you have unlocked and continue to level up further in that episode (depth). Each episode also has harder 'side quests' for this purpose. These side quests are intended for the players who want to put in more hours, and give a further reason to keep levelling up your professions in earlier episodes. Over time, we plan to add even higher level side quests, so that your Hopeport guard level will keep being useful for a long time! The difficulty of a side quest is indicated by its number of stars.
The episodes are also heavily interlinked, so you will regularly find yourself going back and forth between them. For example: You might use your episode 3 combat to kill some monsters for potion reagents. You might then take these reagents back to episode 1 to make some potions, which you then use in episode 4. Once you reach episode 3, you can also start making your own weapons which you can 'tune' for use in ANY of episodes 1 to 4, further interlinking the back and forth between the episodes, and allowing you to rapidly gear up in episode 4.
This isn't so much of an issue with the gathering skills, but when it comes to combat-related ones, this takes some getting used to, and I suspect it will be a dealbreaker for quite a bit of people.
Final Thoughts
In the end, what do I think? I think Brighter Shores is a fun MMO in the beginning, but after progressing to the second area, the desire to start the combat grind over again is lacking. So, maybe I'll log in again after a few patches, which seem to come out fairly regularly and the devs are quickly working on tweaks and more to the game.
If you are looking for something new play, I suggest giving it a shot, it could be right up your alley, and at worst, you waste a few hours of your time, which I think is a fair ask for a free-to-play game. If you decide you want to support the game, there is an optional subscription that looks to give you access to the third and fourth areas, but I haven't looked into the price, nor am I sure that those areas will eventually come to the free players.