Raubritter, the tried and true of a medieval survival different from the usual
Raubritter
Although it does not include among its ranks the great masterpieces, the medieval survival trend is particularly prolific and can also boast a decent following, having produced over the years a myriad of small playful experiences that have often had the same lowest common denominator, their structure geared towards online multiplayer. Recently, however, Raubritter has appeared on the shelves of Steam libraries, a first-person survival sandbox set in late medieval Europe, which does not resemble the others already on sale on the platform due to its strong single player meaning.The game is the result of the efforts of a very small Polish team, the Medieval Bytes, and is preparing to face a long phase of Early Access which will officially begin in July. To find out more about this project, we started exploring the demo that is available right now on the Valve platform, looking forward to talking about it in this article.
After trying Raubritter, will it be just another medieval survival or is it really a project to put on your wish list? Let's find out together.
The hard life of the second child
Hamish, the NPC in charge of Raubritter's tutorial Raubritter will also be an open-world survival sandbox, but every self-respecting single player has a solid narrative background and the title of the guys from Medieval Bytes does not want to be outdone. The story, linked among other things to an expression of the historiography that gives its name to the game, tells us about the descendant of a noble house of the late Middle Ages Germanic, stripped of titles and his legitimate possessions by his eldest brother, who sees him first and foremost as a huge threat to his power. Exiled and disowned by his own dynasty, the protagonist will have to rebuild his fortune by starting over from the ground up, trying to accumulate treasures and riches through the noble art of banditry, with the sole objective of getting back everything he deserves by birthright.Unfortunately, the demo does not allow you to get an idea of the weight that the story will have within the adventure, but the developers promise a profound quest system that will eventually make us interact with a multitude of NPCs, too through some RPG elements of which, however, very little is known at the moment.
After all, the concept developed by the Polish studio foresees just this: through the classic dynamics of the survival sandbox, we will first of all be called to build a camp, to equip it with defenses and work stations, and then use it as a base for support for raids to neighboring villages and to merchants passing through the large roads that connect them.
Carefully managing relations with the inhabitants of the area will be crucial, since pulling too hard could lead the villagers to identify us as the real perpetrators of the misdeeds and to unleash us against the royal guards. To plot assaults and looting, it will even be possible to ally with other players to form a gang, since the studio has decided to enable a four-player co-op that is already fully functional.
A lot of work to do
The only village featured in the demo. The concept chosen by Medieval Bytes is really interesting, if only because it adopts a perspective, that of the unscrupulous bandit, which is rarely encountered in a survival video game set in the Middle Ages. However, having taken the first steps inside the demo, one can quickly realize how much Raubritter is extraordinarily immature and how the build available to users is nothing more than a very small pre-alpha, filled up to the edge of all kinds of technical criticalities.The first minutes, although they highlight the angularity of the control system and the dancing animations of the protagonist and his mentor Hamish, flow smoothly between the tracks of a tutorial that introduces the player to crafting and collecting natural resources with which to set up the first camp structures. We immediately get to build an arch, and with that to hunt some rabbits to get meat and skins, but as soon as we are entrusted with the task of reaching the nearest village to sell these materials, we are greeted by a mass of absolutely empty buildings and devoid of any decoration, inhabited by four NPCs in number with which the interactions are reduced to the bone. A few minutes later the tutorial concludes, and while the play area is large enough, there is nothing else to do but count the number of invisible walls that limit exploration.
Build your own legacy with your bare hands
A view of our camp after an hour of crafting Actually, there is one aspect of the demo that has not been cut with a hatchet and is adequate despite the state of play on the game. We are talking about crafting, which in this version is sufficiently layered and guarantees the possibility of erecting progressively more complex structures as the workbenches necessary to expand the list of constructible objects are built. Of course, Raubritter will not revolutionize its genre of reference, but it was nice to move among the many objects available in this demo, organizing the arrangement of the structures to have everything at hand.There is everything you need. to provide for the needs of the character: with a campfire you can cook meat, while a well guarantees an almost infinite supply of water. The ingots are melted with the furnace, the hides are worked with the tanner to make the first items of clothing, and by building a dedicated table you can transform the wood into boards, which in turn will be very useful for making the elements of the house.
There will be a fight in Raubritter In short, a classic crafting system like those already seen in as many survival sandboxes, but everything works properly and it is clear that this was the priority of Medieval Bytes. Over the course of the year, if all goes according to plan, it will become possible to erect an entire fortress, and who knows what horizons the work of the development studio will go to.
It is very early to understand if Raubritter will have the strength to soar among the other survival sandboxes that crowd the Steam libraries. What is certain is that the concept put together by Medieval Bytes is nothing short of interesting, but the work to be done is still a lot and although the crafting works, in this version there is practically nothing else. The combat system is crude, the animations are an eyesore, but the team is releasing a constant stream of updates to the demo, fixing the issues reported by the community from time to time. It will be difficult and tiring, but Raubritter could do it. See you in a few years.
