I’ll start off by saying that I don’t actually want to leave a negative review. I didn’t get very far in Enshrouded but even early on, I was enjoying it enormously, for all the same reasons many others have outlined in their reviews: gorgeous vistas, fun combat—ranger especially tickles much of the same satisfaction as the classic stealth-archer builds of Skyrim, with a bigger power fantasy—and of course, the building system. All great, all created with obvious love and care.
However, there is one feature which has detracted quite enormously from my enjoyment of the game, and that is the way Enshrouded implements co-op. Going into this game, I’d read about how questing and exploration was server-wide, meaning whatever one person accomplished counted for the progression of all. In a friend group that’s lucky to get together more than once a month, this didn’t bode well. But I’d also read about the ‘missed quests’ feature, which would allow players to repeat quests completed by others for themselves. I thought maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, so when the topic of buying our own hosted server came up in the friend group, I agreed.
Unfortunately the missed quests feature has proven to be something of an albatross. It became a looming reminder of how far I’d fallen behind my friends, whose discoveries around the map continuously updated my own, populating my unexplored areas with POIs and quest icons. No longer am I running into a dark section of the map excitedly wondering if there will be something to find. Someone found it first ages ago, and now I have dozens of glaring “go this way” icons all over my map that are impossible to ignore every time I bring it up. Not to mention NPCs are now giving me quests that have nothing to do with anything I’ve personally done, or reference events I haven’t completed.
So, I tried to just go off of the missed quests list itself. But this doesn’t work either. There’s no way to tell which part of the map each quest takes place in until you manually track it, and see “oh I haven’t been anywhere near there yet” and try the next. What’s worse, rather than being able to discover these quests for myself, it felt like I was just ticking items off a grocery list made by someone else. It quickly became extremely demotivating to even try, leading to me falling even further behind.
People have tried to tell me that the world is the main character of the game, not you the player, but I don’t care about being ‘the main character’. I care about the sense of discovery and exploration, which really drew me into Enshrouded at the start, and yet is bafflingly sacrificed if you want to enjoy the world with friends who aren’t glued to the hip 24/7. Everything in the world resets, so it seems especially strange to me that progression is tied to the server, when by all accounts these discoveries could be easily omitted for the ‘slower’ players to uncover on their own.
I know others with similar situations have decided that certain things, like bosses or puzzles, are to be saved for group play, but to me that’s not a viable solution either. I don’t want to play the game on eggshells worrying that such-and-such is off limits. I want to be able to explore what catches my eye, attempt challenges as I find them, and I don’t begrudge my friends for wanting to do the same. They shouldn’t have to feel guilty for playing at their own pace, and I shouldn’t have to feel like I’m failing for playing at mine. We just wanted a server where every so often we could come together on especially difficult challenges when our schedules aligned, and otherwise enjoy one another’s building progress at our respective altars, as we’ve done in similar games in the past. Don’t even get me started on how restricting NPCs to a single instance in the server has restricted the latter.
Ultimately, it seems this game just isn’t for groups like ours. I appreciate that the devs have tried to alleviate the issue with the missed quests feature, but as I’ve outlined, it just doesn’t work the way we need it to. Now I’m stuck in a position where I don’t want to continue on our shared server, but I also don’t have it in me to rebuild my base for a *third* time after I stripped it down on my original world to come to our hosted one. I’m not sure who even benefits from a system like this, except maybe people who hate questing altogether and are happy to miss out. It’s disappointing and a bit heartbreaking after enjoying the game so much at the start.
If ever the day comes where the devs change this system once again, to create an option for progression to be *truly* per-character instead of per-server, where POIs and quests remain utterly blacked out until *you* find them—or at least, make it so that they only count if you’re present for their completion—I’ll welcome it with open arms and gladly adjust this review. Until then, I’m at an impasse, and can’t in good faith recommend this game to anyone looking to play in a group of working adults. Enjoy it solo or enjoy it with someone whose schedule perfectly mirrors your own; otherwise, you’re in for a rough ride. If this bloated wall of text is any indication, I really do care about Enshrouded passionately, and I personally will continue to follow its updates and hold out hope that something changes one day. Thanks for reading.
