In this Myth of Empires Early Access Gameplay Overview, I’m going to run through the core mechanics of the game, which involve gathering and crafting, talents and skills, and base-building features of the new survival RPG developed by Angela Game and published by Antiidelay. Myth of Empires Early Access was released on November 18, 2021 on PC via Steam.

Myth of Empires Early Access Gameplay Overview

What is Myth of Empires Early Access?

Myth of Empires Early Access is an open-world and sandbox survival RPG where the idea is to build an empire from scratch with or without the help of others. If you’ve played survival games such as Conan Exiles, Tribes of Midgard, and Ark: Survival Evolved, then you may want to give this one a try. Myth of Empires has a familiar weather system as Tribes of Midgard where you need to stock up on equipment or potions to prevent your HP from going down. For instance, if you’re in a Cold Area and you drink Baijiu, you’ll be able to temporarily resist the cold, allowing you to safely traverse the area.

As with any survival game, you’ll be gathering materials from grass, branches, and raw meat, to copper and clay ore so you can slowly build your house, and consequently, your empire. However, there’s one vital characteristic that I have to point out for Myth of Empires and this is the multiplayer mode. The game feels very different if you play it solo as opposed to engaging in activities with friends.

For instance, mining copper ore can take a long time to do since you either have to search for these deposits across vast mountainous areas or to fight against aggressive and hostile NPCs, which is challenging to do alone. But if you’re part of a guild, you’ll all be able to build your empire together, and therefore, much more efficiently, in preparation for higher level content. Myth of Empires Early Access features public and private servers as well as an in depth gathering and crafting system. You’ll also be able to upgrade your talents and skills depending on the activities you intend to focus on the most, assemble workbenches, construct buildings, and engage in PvE and PvP.

Overview and Setting

Myth of Empires is set in an ancient eastern continent where the Emperor has lost its power, leaving a huge void in its wake. In the event of the government’s downfall, leaders wage wars against one another while bandits continue to terrorize its remaining citizens. Your goal is to thrive by building all of your equipment, structures, manor and empire from the ground up. You can also recruit neutral vagrants or intimidate them as you see fit in order to help with your tasks.

You begin by choosing a server, whether it’s public or private should you prefer to play with others or with friends, respectively. If you opt to create a private server, you have the ability to adjust certain settings to your liking. For example, you can reduce the building’s decay feature or increase the respawn rate frequency of ores. Everyone initially arrives in PvE servers but when you’re above level 16, you can choose to transfer to a PvP server.

You start the game by collecting a ton of grass, branches and rubble in order to create the most basic tools like the Stone Hammer and Stone Axe. These will help you to acquire more and better materials such as ore, straw rope, and hardwood, to name a few. What’s good with Myth of Empires is the early tutorial in the form of quests to familiarize you with essential resources.

However, not everything has been translated well into English as some of the text is still written in Chinese so you’ll have to figure out the rest of it along the way. Afterward, you’ll be able to craft other tools and workbenches, buildings and furniture, and weapons and armor from your inventory. Relatively advanced items such as the Bronze Gear require a specific workbench, particularly the Tailor Bench. As such, it’s important to establish a highly fortified base to secure these stations.

Myth of Empires consists of breathtaking and gigantic landscapes and lighting that make you stop in awe. It has this gorgeous night and day cycle, steep and sharp mountain ridges, and clear blue rivers. What makes the environment realistic is the animals and NPCs, which freely roam around different areas. However, it can look rough and uneven at times. You’ll also notice distinct stutters and framerate drops even in the simple act of running.

In terms of the audio, not much has been added except for the grunts of hostile guards when you approach them, the average thuds of your tools hitting the bark of a tree, or the tantrums of a horse as it rages away from you. On top of these, the ambiance is noticeably quiet but hopefully in the game’s full release, the developers will have added decent quality music and sound effects to make the overall experience memorable.

Gameplay Mechanics

When you create your character in Myth of Empires, you can expect a good deal of customization, including genders, facial features, body types, and tattoos. You’ll then select from a series of commanderies or regions as well as specific servers, before choosing the area you wish to start in. Note that if you have any intention of joining a particular guild, you need to do it sooner rather than later. You can only transfer to an adjacent server via the Carter located in a Neutral Bandit Camp if you have enough copper coins.

Otherwise, you’ll have to delete and recreate your character from scratch. And this can be laborious especially if you’ve already progressed much further in the previous server. Regardless of whether or not you’ll be participating in PvP, I highly recommend joining a guild because the game is much more enjoyable with others. The grind of having to gather every resource and craft every workbench and structure while preventing your buildings from decaying will be manageable. But if you really want to challenge yourself, then you’ll enjoy the difficulties that lie ahead.

Gathering and Crafting

Gathering in Myth of Empires is pretty straightforward because you can literally acquire anything you see in the wilderness from seeds to grass together with wildflower and clay ore. But some resources are harder to obtain than others depending on their locations. For instance, large copper and iron mine deposits are usually situated in the bases of aggressive NPCs so you’ll need your guildmates’ assistance to beat them. Alternatively, you can keep exploring mountainous areas or alluvial plains to search for these mineral deposits.

Players will spend a very good amount of time crafting in Myth of Empires, and in some ways it’s somewhat similar to New World’s crafting, though less polished. For starters, you need to accumulate more than 1,000 grass, branches and rubble in order to craft most of the basic items in the game. However, this doesn’t take as long as you might think, given that these resources are abundant.

Dying is punished by dropping everything where you die, leaving your corpse behind. However, you can retrieve your belongings within the allotted period of time, allowing you to get them back. However, it can be somewhat frustrating if you are not prepared, so it’s a good idea to store things you don’t absolutely need at your base.

Every time you level up, you gain recipe points, which you can then use to unlock recipes for crafting. Since you basically make everything you own, you’ll have access to a ton of recipes. The points you have won’t be enough to obtain all of them, however, so you need to be selective regarding the ones you wish to prioritize. Similar to gathering, crafting items is easy to understand. It provides you with details on their attributes, the resources you need, and the workbenches required.

Attributes, Talents and Skills, and Nobility

When it comes to your character, you need to be mindful of certain attributes and toxicity levels. You’ll have to constantly eat cooked food in order to remain full, which restores your stamina. Stamina is reduced when you run too fast or miss hitting your targets. As such, you have to balance both attributes because it affects your performance, vision and health. It’s not hard to survive when you consistently consume edible food since you can easily hunt down animals and cook their raw meat.

Additionally, you have to consider weather and environmental hazards depending on where your base is set up. In my experience, I haven’t encountered these issues in the Alluvial Plain or the South Eastern part of the map. Toxicity levels come into play based on the damage you’ve taken, the number of times you’ve died, and the raw food you’ve consumed. If they surpass the 20% mark, you’ll experience decreased HP, Stamina, and carry capacity, respectively. You’ll then need to eat specific food to reduce them to normal levels.

Next are talents, namely, Strength, Agility, Physique, Wisdom and Charisma. Now each of them have five skills that you’ll be leveling up. For instance, under Physique, you can improve Mining by gathering clay, copper and iron ore. At higher levels, you unlock permanent perks. So if you reach level 150 with this skill, you’ll be able to gain access to the Tier 1 Mine Extraction Boost I to raise the amount of resources you gather as well as Experienced Miner 1 to decrease your hammer’s durability when mining. The more you engage in a certain activity, the more proficient you become.

In addition to the recipe points you get upon leveling up your character, you receive expertise points, which you can use to invest in these talents. Doing so increases your experience efficiency in order to expedite the way you level up your skills. If you’re one of the main miners of the guild, then I suggest maximizing the points you allocate to the Mining Skill to unlock its corresponding perks.

Lastly is nobility that consists of incremental but beneficial bonuses for your character. You can improve this by spending copper coins and earning honor points from playing the game. For example, the leap from Commoner to Baron raises your max health by 2.5%. It’s not much at the start but this eventually accumulates to encompass other bonuses such as increased Piercing and Blunt Damage.

Combat

Combat in Myth of Empires has two options, specifically the MOE and Classic Modes. The main difference is their eight and four multi-directional attacks, respectively. However, I prefer the Classic Mode since currently, the combat is pretty clunky especially when you’re wielding a melee weapon such as a spear. Aiming isn’t a problem but the hit detection is.

Having to constantly miss piercing an animal that’s already in front of you coupled with the awkward animation is frustrating. And it becomes worse when you’re riding a horse. To counter this, it’s best to wield a bow as well as to select the 4-directional attack so you won’t have to keep changing your position just to effectively attack the target.

If you’re playing solo, you can recruit vagrants by providing them with the items they need or by knocking them out with a club. You’re then able to turn them into warriors who will fight alongside you. Furthermore, you have to make sure your gear is sufficiently upgraded before engaging in combat because NPCs are brutal. They tend to cut your HP by half if you’re not careful. Note that every run is persistent so when you lose all of your items upon death, your character’s level in addition to their talent and skill upgrades will be retained.

Building Your Empire

One of the earliest quests to get you started in building your empire is creating a house. This introduces you to the different wooden structures you have to make such as foundations, walls and territory banners, which are necessary to prevent them from decaying for two days. You’ll also be taught to craft a simple bedroll to teleport from one area to the next.

However, you have to construct a chest or locker to store your items and to prepare gathering and survival equipment in the location you intend to teleport to. Every time you do this, you won’t be able to bring any of your current items. Additionally, you have the ability to tame and mount horses to traverse areas faster, carry additional materials, and use them in combat.

As you continue to unlock more and more recipes, you gain access to upgraded versions of foundations made from bricks, clay and steel for fortification. There are so many buildings and furniture to craft as well as production lines and economies to run to successfully develop your base. Even in PvE, you and your guildmates are able to partake in several events. One major example is the County Battle that involves a major siege where all guilds can participate to acquire the imperial seal and the Magistrate title. As a Magistrate, you’ll be able to assume control of the entire land by primarily setting taxes in order to further expand your empire.

Final Thoughts

Myth of Empires Early Access is an open-world, survival RPG where crafting, high quality gear, team synergy, and base-building are a significant part of the gameplay loop, and are necessary to succeed in creating a powerful and thriving nation. Consistently crafting structures and essential equipment are important to gradually improve your base while strengthening your defenses should protect you if hostile soldiers should pay you a visit.

Even if there are improvements to be made in Myth of Empires: such as combat, occasional framerate drops and optimization issues, and lack of memorable music and sounds, Myth of Empires shows promise in terms of its survival features. Gathering resources, unlocking recipes, crafting items, and exploring beautiful landscapes will entice you to keep playing for several hours at a time.

If you’re looking to challenge yourself with a sandbox RPG where the freedom to build everything from nothing matters, then you’ll want to try out Myth of Empires even during Early Access. As confirmed by Angela Game, additional content will be implemented in the coming months. It’s already available and costs 29.99 USD. You can use the link below to support the channel!

---

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out our recent previews Ruined King: A League of Legends Story & Turn-Based RPG and Top 10 Soulslikes to Play While You Wait for Elden Ring.