The medieval MMO Life is Feudal: Your Own has embraced its "realistic" bona fides a little more tightly with the addition of seasonal weather that have a real impact on the game. Rain is great for plant growth but livestock prefers sunny days, and of course snow can be fun in small doses but for the most part is just an all-around hassle.

Piles of snow will actually accumulate during wintry weather, and then melt away when the days turn warmer. It can be used as crafting material for snowballs and snowmen—that's the fun part—but if it's left to accumulate, it will negate the speed bonus that's normally conferred when traveling along roads, and can even freeze and destroy crops.

The new weather effects look pretty nice, but developer Bitbox Ltd. warned that rain and snow particles can take a toll on lower-end graphics cards. To counter that, an option to turn the effects off has been added to the video options menu.

The enhanced weather effects were added to the game as part of an update released the day before Christmas, which also imposed a limit on sprinting to make it more of a short situational dash in combat, added large animal traps (which will also work on humans), implemented mass production recipes for charcoal, glass, and linen, and made a number of other changes and bug fixes. Details on all the new features and fixes can be found on Steam.

There's a warning about Life is Feudal: Your Own that's seemingly built into its very title—that little play on the word "futile" that's a tad too perfect to be an accident. Be grateful for that warning. You could end up like me, fully confident that months of sampling other survival sims like Rust and ARK: Combat Evolved had prepared you for what this medieval themed variant has to offer. But after I spent several minutes combing the beach I'd washed up on for the flint the spartan tutorial told me I could use to make an axe (along with some branches and plant fiber), I knew I was wrong. This was real. A little too real. Barely an hour in, trying to eke out an existence on the smug little private server I'd made seemed like it was a very futile endeavor indeed.

There's a lot to admire about that devotion to realism, though, particularly as it allows interactions with objects through right-clicks and menus that most of its genre cousins would shy from. When I stumble across an elm in the woods, for instance, I can yank off its branches or shave its trunk for bark or just chop the whole thing down for use in a building elsewhere. But the realism doesn't end there—in this feudal world, you'll find no Skyrim-style bags that hold more than an entire merchant's shop. If I want to use that log, I'll have to slowly haul the thing over to the site, all the while wearing a pained grimace that would make the Sheriff of Nottingham beam with pride. And then I'll do it again. And again.

Anyone who who attempts to do this alone is frankly doing it wrong. Hate people? This isn't for you—even living as a raider requires some helping hands to cart off the stuff you steal. I suppose there are some masochists who wouldn't mind paying 40 bucks to live like Tom Hanks and Wilson on the game's island setting, but this is largely meant to be a game about crafting predesigned cozy cottages and manors rather than shoddy leafy huts. Much as the game itself takes its name from an intricate social structure, so does Life is Feudal itself place a heavy emphasis on cooperation and socialization. In the absence of enemies like zombies or dinos (or even many animals apart from oxen, deer, and the occasional bear), it's other players that matter here. In Life is Feudal, it takes a village to make a village.

Cottage industry

Having some other peasants to help along doesn't fix everything, though, especially considering that each server has a maximum limit of 64 players at a time. That means that even though PvP combat and a rudimentary morality system exist (although some server GMs ban players who start squabbles), it never reaches the potential for the real wars implicit in the title since there's rarely enough people active to build the kind of heavy fortifications such events require. (Not to mention that the combat is a slow mess that poorly mimics Mount & Blade and drains your stamina to the point of uselessness in seconds.) Thanks to the labor required to do the simplest tasks, even relatively busy servers often have little more than a couple of huts and a sad little palisade to account for weeks and weeks of work.

Find the right group, though, and you'll find some gratification in the grind. The sluggish pace means that the construction of a mere cottage is an event worth celebrating. The vast amount of skills involved means players have a tendency to slip into focused careers when playing with others, which helps create the illusion of a bona fide working society. Does it sometimes feel like a new real world job in the process? You're darned right it does. All the same, I found some quiet satisfaction in the knowledge that I was building structures that would help my community survive and not just clocking in hours for pay that I'd use to pay someone else. In its best moments, Life is Feudal recalls a beautiful simplicity we've lost in the modern world.

It doesn't hurt that the world itself is quite the looker in spots, even if it tended to bog my GeForce GTX 780 to slideshow speeds on medium settings. Still, I doubt that's enough to keep me coming back until something, at least, speeds up in Life is Feudal, but I can't deny that there was something deeply fulfilling about finding the myriad uses for objects around me that kept me coming back even after enduring the occasional crash and lingering bugs. For a while, anyway. Right now, having just spent an hour trudging back and forth to a tree to help build a simple chest, I'm more than ready for the Renaissance.

Life is Feudal: Your Own developer Bitbox has been showing off the enhanced DirectX 11 visuals of its survival game as it prepares to leave Early Access next week. The difference, which you can get a sense of with the above comparison screenshot, is reasonably impressive, making Life Is Feudal look a little bit more like something that might get released today as opposed to, say, 2011. 

The footage below takes you through all the basic features of crafting, hunting and combat in Life Is Feudal while showcasing enhancements like fancy foliage and better lighting effects. A batch of comparison screens like the above show off environments that look a touch more realistic—since they're selling the game for 25/$40 at launch in a genre that tends to stick around the $20-$30 mark, I think such an upgrade was important. Life Is Feudal will leave Early Access with a 40% off sale, though.

Last week, Bitbox used the precious Northern fantasy-friendly resource that is Sean Bean to announce the game's November 17th release date (no, they didn't kill him off at the end etc lol). We (almost certainly Chris Livingston, who sampled the game last year) will be reviewing Life Is Feudal in the near future, so keep an eye out for that. 

Our Early Access review of Life is Feudal: Your Own from October of last year declared it demanding, and not particularly stable on the technological side of things, but bearing "loads of promise" nonetheless. It's just about time to find out if it's lived up to that potential, as developer Bitbox announced today that the game will leave Early Access on November 17. It's $40, but will launch with a 40% discount when it becomes a Real Grown-Up Video Game.

As we noted in that long-ago look, Life is Feudal is a much slower sort of experience than conventional survival games like Rust, and it's also far more community-oriented. It's possible to fly solo but working with others is really the name of the game, and the tendency to commit mass murder that's so prevalent in other do-what-thou-wilt sandboxes is mitigated by a clever alignment system and the ability to yield in fights: Winners can claim victory (and the spoils thereof) and both parties can go home with all their pieces still attached.

Bitbox marked the coming full release of Life is Feudal with a new teaser featuring the one and only Sean Bean. It's an animated story trailer rather than in-game action, and in a nice change of pace he doesn't actually die at the end, although it does end badly. If a look at proper gameplay is more your thing (Raise that barn! Tend those cattle!) then you may get an eyeful over on Steam.

Life may be futile, but at least there are free games sometimes, eh?  Life is Feudal: Your Own is a 64-player medieval sandbox with lots of toys: you've got your crafting, your farming, your combat, your building. We enjoyed it last year, though mostly for its promise (it's still in Early Access), and now you have a chance to check it out risk-free. The developer has offered us 500 Steam codes, which we're raffling off.

As usual, rather than a 'first come first serve' giveaway, which would be over in 10 minutes, we're asking that you enter your e-mail below for a chance to be randomly selected for a key. The selection will happen Saturday morning so that there's enough time for lots of people to get in on it. Winners will be emailed their keys. Good luck!

Update: Entries are now closed and keys are being distributed to randomly selected winners.

Alpha and Early Access reviews offer our preliminary verdicts on in-development games. We may follow up this unscored review with a final, scored review in the future. Read our full review policy for details.

The beginning of multiplayer medieval survival crafting game Life is Feudal: Your Own will sound familiar. You start in your underpants with just a handful of cookies (the perfect beginning to a day, really) and your first step is to make a few tools. By harvesting branches (snapped off trees), stones (plucked from rocky hillsides), and plant fiber (gathered by rooting around in the grass), you can make an axe for chopping down trees, and a saw for cutting logs into boards or billets for building structures or furniture. Make a shovel and pickaxe and you can start unearthing minerals, and once you've built a furnace and you can start smelting, your first step to creating weapons, armor, and better tools.

The difference here, as opposed to Minecraft or even Rust, is in time and realism. In Minecraft you can have a basic hovel built in minutes, in Rust, within a half-hour (provided you're not murdered). I found a small settlement on one LiF server, being worked on by several players, and I've checked in on their progress a few times over the week. They've got some furnaces going, a chicken coop, the beginnings of fortifications, and a bit of leveled land cleared for farming, but no looming castle or sprawling township. Yet. Successful building is a group effort and it takes real time. Your inventory is based on weight and in some cases, size, so transporting a single log means slowly lugging it around on your back, and even when cut into boards you won't be able to hold more than a dozen at a time.

Interactions with the environment are done through drop-down menus. Right-click on a section of the ground, choose the type of action you'd like to perform (prospecting, gathering, etc.), then choose the specific action. It's made simpler by the ability to set a default activity, so if you plan on collecting a bunch of stones, you can click that option straight away instead of having to navigate the menus each time. Still, the system is a bit cumbersome as opposed to, say, a game where you hold an axe and click on a tree. Crafting itself is well-presented: choose what you're trying to make from a drop-down list, it will show you the required ingredients and how many you have of each, and a button-click will put it together in a few moments.

As you perform actions, your related skills increase. Build, and you'll become a better builder. Farm, and you'll become a better farmer. Hard skillcaps mean you'll never become a master of all trades (except on private servers, where caps can be tweaked), meaning that you'll have to aim for a specialization (blacksmith, carpenter, hunter) and team with other players with other skillsets. Characters are tied to the server they're created on, meaning you can't take your badass blacksmith and plunk him down in a different world. I get this reasoning: it wouldn't be fair to quickly build up your character on a server with more forgiving settings and then unleash him on some hardcore server where people are tirelessly busting their butts to increase their stats. At the same time, put in 80 hours on a server and decide you don't much like it there (or if the server is abandoned) and you'll be starting over with a blank slate, which could be a bitter pill to swallow.

You can create a private server and go at it alone—I did a bit of this while learning to play—but LiF is obviously heavily aimed at a collaborative experience. There's no real creative mode but there is a GM mode you can access when creating a private server, allowing you to enter codes in the console to spawn items, change your stats, observe players, and use other 'cheats.'

What's the goal? Well, survival, for one, though typically that's not too hard. Find an apple tree and you can quickly gather enough food to last you the day, and you'll hear angry wolves well before they attack you, allowing you to flee if you're not armed or armored. If you choose to fight, good luck: combat, at the moment, is a bit rudimentary. My fights with wolves have consisted of sluggishly thrusting my crafted axe in their direction (there's no targeting or crosshair) as they snarled and bit me. Be careful attacking other players: some servers discourage it and may ban you (I'm basing this on observations of global chat conversations), while others are full PVP. Dying means respawning in just your underpants and losing a fair number of skill points, plus playing in a weakened state until your character mentally recovers from the trauma of rebirth. You can also be knocked unconscious, and recovering can take several minutes during which you'll be able to do nothing but stare at your comatose body, which can be looted in the meantime.

The biggest issue I'm having with Life is Feudal is its complete lack of stability. Nearly all my sessions ended much earlier than I wanted them to due to frequent crashes and occasional server timeouts (the third most common reason was me quitting because night fell and it's simply too dark for too long to enjoy playing). Loading the game and joining a server can take several minutes, and I'm often completely unable to join the private server I created, with no reason given. There are other assorted irritations, like the fact that you can't back out to the main menu: you have to exit the game entirely, even just to choose a different server. I imagine a lot of this will be fixed in the future, but it's annoying as heck now.

I admire the LiF's grittiness, and that it requires a real investment of time and dedication from its players. The idea of genuinely collaborating on a town with friends, building it up, and then defending it against competing towns is definitely appealing, though at the moment it feels like just that: an idea. Most of its planned features have simply yet to be created or implemented. It's also $40/ 25, which is quite steep (DayZ, by comparison, is only $30, and you probably know how incensed people get about that early-access experiment).

Verdict

It's got loads of promise, but I'd really only recommend Life is Feudal to the most dedicated of enthusiasts, willing to contribute (suffer?) during what feels like very early stages of development.

Outlook

Unclear. Life is Feudal is doing strong sales and is one of the most popular games on Steam at the moment, which hints at a large, passionate community with keen interest in its success. At the same time, there's a monstrous amount of work still to be done by an unproven development team.