Joei’s PVP experience

Good guy or Bad guy

Now when you have learnt how to survive in PVE (see Joei's PVE Adventure), much more tricky task awaits – prevail at PVP and maintain your presence on the island. Sooner or later, you'll have to make a choice, whether you're going to be Good guy or Bad guy. Good guys kill Bad guys only and pillage houses that belong to them. Bad guys kill anyone, pillage anything, and are being hunted by Good guys. Game itself doesn't track who is good and who is bad, it is the community and your reputation within.

Out of Reach is full loot PVP game and does not limit you to attack anyone anytime anywhere. There is no safe spot for you, and your house is never safe as well. Is it just you and few Bad gyus on the server at the moment? Bad luck… All you can do is log out and wait for better conditions – forget about gathering resources and building your house at such times, you will just get killed all over again :-/ The island is rather small, some 3 km x 3 km, so there are no really remote places where you can play completely out of sight.

Good news is, that Good guys are present very often, they are builders usually, so have rich online times that are needed for resources gathering. So as a new player, stay close to Good guys, make a small shack, gather your first resources and make some equipment, before starting on your own at more remote area. Moreover, you will always need a safe-house with spare equipment you can back up to, everytime things go wrong for you and your main house/fortress is attacked. 

Housing

House-bulding system is component based and you might already used very similar one in different game. Everything is built instantly, you just need to have enough resources in your inventory, and since there is no weight limit, you can carry all necessary resorces on you and build your house at new location in few minutes. There are just 3 resources you need, Wood, Rock and Bronze – it's that simple. No tools, no nails, fabric, straw, ropes or locks… 

This vid show pretty well how the house is built, it is almost a year old, but still valid

It is nice to build pretty houses like this, but such structures can be conquered quite easily. Real PVPers build 3 kinds of indestructible bases, taking advantage of flawed game mechanics

• high tower with Builder's Desk on top, high enough to stay Out of Reach of trebuchet fire (em>see the first picture)

• house on top of the steep hill, or below the steep hill at water level, at the place where trebuchet cannot be placed anywhere near (treb needs a bit of flat land to be placed

• house or just a platform with Builder's Desk hidden in the rock, therefore unreachable and indestructible (yeah, that is real exploit)

To clarify, lets talk about house destruction mechanics. Some part can be destroyed by your weapon – doors, beds, Builder's Desk. But walls, windows and floors cannot! Only house owner can destroy those, attacker needs to use a trebuchet in order to destroy those. The house can be pillaged after destruction of special item called Builder's Desk. If a house does not have Builder's Desk built or if it has been destroyed, you can 

• loot all containers inside of the house (you cannot even loot stuff if BD is present)

• build any extension to the house, including Builder's Desk (basically taking over the house)

• set a whole house on fire… harsh… possibly many hours of resources gathering and building… and it's gone in few seconds

get inside, destroy Builder's Desk and set the house on fire!

Basic strategy for every house is to surround the Builder's Desk (BD) by walls, so BD is unreachable for those who simply bash the door and gets inside your house. Remeber, doors can be bashed, walls cannot, you need trebuchet to destroy walls. Making trebuchet and operate it takes quite a lot of time and resources, so random villain will not bother doing so, just to pillage your little shack, that you can rebuild quite easily. Fact is that it can cost more time and resources to destroy small house than to build it. 

Well, it proved bit brutal that players were losing entire houses when being offline, even if attackers needed to use costly and clumsy trebuchet to get to the BD. So after some time, game developers introduced questionable measure to prevent that: after destroying BD, a 3-72 hour protection period kicks in, during which house cannot be looted and/or destroyed. (The lenght of the period depends on how much resources you have invested to upgrade your BD.) So now, on contrary, it is almost impossible to loot and burn someone's house if owner plays actively, because as an attacker, you are not willing nor capable to patrol the house non-stop for let's say 24 hours to prevent the owner of rebuilding BD. It seems not ideal either way… What would you like the most for such a thing like house looting & destroying?

PVP fight

Take a look on 2 vids of Captain Roberts to have an idea about how PVP looks like. First is more about PVP fight,

 and the second involves sieging od Bad guy's base (too bad for him that he didnt build his base indestructible)

Lower left corner shows your 3 characteristics – health, stamina and hunger. During PVP fight, stamina is important  (and health, ofc). Stamina gets depleted by running and replenished during walking, so clever combination of running and walking, together with switching from bow to melee weapon, gives you an advantage over your opponent. You should also learn how to eat food during your movement, for health refill – when eating, menu has to be put up and you cannot use mouse for changing direction, but you can still walk/run forward. 

Widely used getaway tactics are swimming, or logging out 🙂 You log out after just 10 seconds, so if you manage to hide for a moment, it may save your life and equipment. Swimming out works quite good too, because it is not easy to shoot a bow, and even harder to hit the swimmer. Pursuer will usually not follow you to the water, because on the other bank, you will have all the advantage – replenished health, stamina and bow in your hand to shoot when pursuer walks out of the water.

Base sieging & defence

Just few more comments on base sieging and defence. As an attacker you should

• make sure there will be more attackers than defenders 🙂

• place a trebuchet about 30-50m from the target, so you can aim for every part

• try to make it difficult for the defenders to get to the trebuchet – they can set it on fire easily just by running to it and tossing a torch

• have load or rocks ready for weights and for an ammunition

• suppress any defender's resistance 🙂

As a defender you shall

• wall yourself inside, so attackers dont get inside after bashing the door

• call for help 🙂

• place defensive balistas, you can try setting some traps

• rebuild damaged parts immediately, since building is instant

•  try to destroy attacking trebuchet

• if you get killed and your respawn bed in your base has been already destroyed, get to your backup shack for new equipment and go fight the attackers

• if your Builder's Desk gets destroyed, rebuild it during protection period, when attackers are offline 🙂 repair damaged house parts and plan your revenge

some real bases on current Khuldas server

Conclusion

I am not very sure why so few people play Out of Reach currently. Is it flawed game mechanics? Boring and lengthy resources gathering? Is it too little content? You get wood+stone+bronze, build a house, make some equipment, fight few players, trebuchet a house, burn it at the end – and after completing all of this, you are done with the game pretty much. It was ok, but nothing special.

Truth is that game offers no long-term perspective like territory control, character leveling, crafting recipes, achievements, not to mention lore or storyline. The game is maybe not much fun to play at all – PVPers are not finding enough good fights, and builders (carebears) are driven away soon after their house gets unmercifully destroyed.

Let's hope Out of Reach will evolve into something much better than it is now, good luck developers!