If you’re an ARPG fan or a survival game fan who’s been jonesing for the next big thing, you might be in luck later this month. Developer Norsfell’s Tribes of Midgard is a 10-player procedurally-generated action-RPG, and it’s all about cooperation rather than competition. As an Einherjar, a powerful warrior revived by Odin to prevent Ragnarök, you won’t be fighting other players for loot, but instead you’ll go out and hunt, gather, and collect souls and materials that you can collectively pool together to purchase advanced fortifications, shops, and upgrades with. And in a full party of 10 players, it’s pretty darned fun.
The primary goal throughout Tribes of Midgard is to defend the Seed of Yggdrasil in the center of your village. This conveniently places you at the center of the world, but by no means are you safe. Helthings spawn at night and give your defenses a good workout, but there’s always a real threat that either they or the giant Jötunn will eventually overrun your village and destroy your Seed of Yggdrasil. It’s convenient then that virtually every system in Tribes of Midgard is designed specifically to maximize convenience.
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For one, you can easily teleport back to town at any time and use waypoints to get back across the map to where you were exploring. And death is never that big of a deal, because you only lose crafting materials and you can basically just pick them out of a chest when you return to your corpse.
If you’re a competitive player, however, you’re out of luck. There’s no PVP here – at all, in fact. There’s no personal storage either – in its place is a community war chest located at the center of town – so you won’t be hoarding any resources away from your teammates or vice versa. And Norsfell CEO Julian Maroda explains that this decision goes back to the origins of the game.
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“The goal was to create a new kind of genre, [surthrival], where the concept of survival is transferred from the individual to the community. By doing so, it becomes intrinsically cooperative. We want Tribes of Midgard to remain a game about cooperation. You can share resources, as you saw in the war chest – because at the end of the day, if the tree dies, it’s game over for everyone.”
This philosophy is carried throughout each of Tribes’ different systems. Shops, gates, and towers in your village can be upgraded collectively. Furthermore, if a guard tower or a gate in the village is destroyed, you and your teammates can chip in to repair it as a community project. And there’s also a nifty little menu for crafting ramps, fences, and other small structures that allow you and your party members to go up hillsides and get across water. But it’s possible that you may get even more intricate with it; Maroda describes a construction system that has “barely scratched the surface” of what it’s capable of becoming.
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As you explore, you’ll come across five different biomes with three different power levels. Each biome has totally unique resources, enemies, and encounters to find. Within that, you’ll see encounters that are more challenging (or less challenging) based on which power level they encompass. You can see your relative power in the upper left corner of the HUD, but Maroda explains that increasing power levels are also visually represented with details like vines and other environmental features. And, conveniently, the upper right corner features a neat sundial that shows weather, time, special events, and other information to help you strategize your adventures throughout the day.
Speaking of, there are special events such as a Blood Moon event (also marked on the aforementioned sundial) that makes tougher monsters and additional challenges spawn in the village during the night. Maroda tells me that the Blood Moon event is deliberately balanced so that it’s then followed by a night that’s totally free of Helthings, and then you’re able to go out and find resources that have undergone a “Night Shift”. This is where certain resource nodes that you’ll have familiarized yourself with by day will behave differently during the night.
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Another cool thing that the developers have created for Tribes of Midgard is their own language, custom-made for the NPCs. Maroda explains that this language, High-Midgardian, is influenced primarily by Norse mythology.
“The closest thing to all Viking language is actually Icelandic, because they were isolated on their island, they kind of kept a lot of the ways in their language about how they used to talk. So we took a lot of trips to Iceland, but also took a lot of influence from their language. We mixed that with Swedish as well.”
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Tribes of Midgard splits off into two different modes that are designed for different time commitments. If you don’t have much time to play, there’s Saga mode, a shorter gametype which features short quests and dungeons but is balanced around Fimbulwinter, a permanent nightfall that arrives about two and a half hours into a match and is designed to kill you off pretty quickly. Once that happens, you’re basically locked in a battle with your and your teammates’ backs against the wall until Helthings ultimately overrun the village.
And then there’s Survival mode, which is all about stretching out your play sessions and surviving as long as you can through the seasons. In both modes, there are quests, raids, and larger events that pop up around the map – all of which douse you in treasure and souls upon completion and are necessary to progress against the roving Helthings and Jötunn.
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I didn’t actually get to see Survival mode in action, but it is supposedly much more open-ended, and will offer more of a sandbox approach, where you can define your own parameters for how the map is laid out. Maroda tells me that you will also be able to define the map’s size and difficulty, and then you can play basically for as long as you want. But you’ll still have to watch out for the towering Jötunn, which become stronger and stronger over the course of each in-game year. Apparently, Norsfell had a team of beta players who survived for up to 20 hours in a single survival mode game.
So far, Tribes of Midgard sounds like it’s shaping up to have some meat on its bones once it launches on July 27. And in the time I got to experience it, it really stoked that feeling of exploration that’s kind of like when you’re first getting into a game like Don’t Starve or Terraria. But the main difference here is that I felt a consistent increase in power as I ventured into the world and leveled up my character. In short, my hopes are riding high with Tribes of Midgard, and I’m excited to check it out when it releases later this month.
