No one will claim that Renown, the Medieval European-flavored base-building survival game, is bringing brand new ideas to the genre. If you’ve played anything like it, from its primary inspiration, Rust, to more modern iterations like Runescape: Dragonwilds, you have a good idea of what you’re in for when you drop into a server to start your journey from humble homesteader to lord of the realm. My brief hands-on time with it was fun, but also raises and doesn’t clearly answer an important question: if you currently have a favorite survival game, is it worth making the switch right now?
My crash course started with a tour of some aspirational structures that were all built with in-game resources. Some of them, like a huge castle complete with a small village lingering in its shadow, were things the team taking me on the tour, lead by Game Director Jesse Jacobsen, didn’t expect to see players to ever be able to make without concerted team efforts. But the ones that were within reasonable player reach were cool in their own rights. Tall sturdy stone walls with mighty working gates to keep enemies out and winding halls and spiraling stairs is a step above what is often just square rooms with storage stuffed in them. The couple I walked through myself came with a significant investment of time and in-game gold, and was positioned as the form your typical endgame stronghold would want to look like before the regular server resets.
So it's only right that we spent the first bit of our session tearing one of them up in a raid, right? After taking a quick spin on a catapult, a few of the devs entrenched themselves inside a nearby fort, while my group attempted to conquer it. We left the siege machine behind and opted for something more mobile: hammers and door-breaching petards to turn them into splinters. When inside, we ran through the halls and stairways looking for fights, eventually culminating into a sprawling skirmish up on the battlements. After putting down the foes, we took the castle’s banner, and claimed it for ourselves.
These fun scenarios make up the bulk of Renown, which is heavily skewed towards players who would rather raise a sword to fight versus a hammer to build. This is reinforced by its mechanically nuanced melee system that takes cues from games like Chivalry, Mordhau, or Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Swinging your weapon at various angles creates different offensive maneuvers which can be useful for getting around shields, the safest and most reliable defense you’ll encounter. For the bolder player, a parry exists that, when timed right, can be followed up with a fast attack that helps poke holes in stubborn defenders. In one-on-one duels, all of this nuance shines and creates a tense back and forth that you won’t find in simpler melee systems. It’s not quite realism, but the lethality of every strike mixed with the motion captured HEMA animations really elevates swordplay in the moment. In multiplayer brawls, I relied very little on these tools, opting to just gang up on whoever my squad was bullying to overwhelm them with blows they couldn’t possibly deflect. Maybe it's pretty realistic after all.
Getting the combat right was the driving force behind Jesse and Executive Producer Charlie Ettershank’s need to make Renown a reality. “Ever since me and Charlie met, we would spend most nights after school discussing how cool it would be for Chivalry combat to be in a survival game.” Jesse told me. They played games like Realm of Kings and Rust and would love everything about it except the melee combat, and took it upon themselves to create the thing they wanted to see in the world.
You of course can’t become a badass knight decked out head-to-toe in plate armor without first knocking trees over with a stick in order to build the workbench that will produce all you need for your empire. The gathering process in survival games like this is never one that I would confidently call “engaging,” but Renown’s is especially boring in comparison to its peers. Some parts of the process are streamlined – you still need to build individual fixtures to craft specific things like a tailor’s bench to make leather armor and a stone furnace to smelt metals – but all the crafting can be done in your inventory menu so you don’t have to stop at every little building to make and receive stuff. But gathering materials felt like more of a chore than ever. Things are pretty expensive, so you'll need a good amount of wood and stone to get the basics. At least they’re easy to find. I spent 10 minutes walking around in search of animals to hunt for hide and fat, essential for moving through the tech tree, and couldn’t find any. I imagine all of this plays differently with a server full of other players who can potentially harass you during your gathering and construction campaigns, but in this leisurely environment, I found it tough to stay motivated to grind. The “survival” part of Renown is also exclusively a PVP thing, as there isn’t much to manage as far as keeping yourself alive if there are no enemy arrows to dodge. Without genre staples like hunger meters or day/night cycles I was free to exist completely at my pace. These mechanics are often nags but without them there’s uncomfortably little push back when playing alone.
There are quite a few steps between crafting your first workstation and creating a sword, steps that can be bypassed if you're willing to venture out into the wilderness to find loot. I did not get to experience this part of Renown in any meaningful way, but I was told that prebuilt points of interest, like the aforementioned grand castle, double as hot spots full of gear and trinkets that could be an instant upgrade to a players kit or at least worth lots of in game gold. I can only speculate that in a PVP environment, this kind of skulking around presents the same dangers as other popular survival games, but I couldn’t speak on how this flows with Renown’s heavy focus on intimate close quarters combat. There were a lot of features that sound great but either I didn’t experience them directly, or they weren’t available yet.
This biggest feature coming that I think will be a pivotal one for Renown’s success long-term are server events. As it stands pre-early access, the 8000 or so playtesters in the alpha right now are tasked to find their own fun, with the construction and combat systems both being toys in an open sandbox of possibilities without any explicit direction from the game itself. Right now, a solid contingent of players collaborate to build strongholds and siege weapons and march on enemy camps without much prompting, but even the RDBK team admits that some guided play would bring some necessary balance. One event they’ve been prototyping would turn an NPC settlement into a claimable fortress when signaled, driving all of the disparate bands of warriors on the server to join one another in chaotic combat over it. Other ideas are based in similar form as this, with caches of loot spawning in specific locations on the map to be claimed by whoever can secure it first.
But Jesse really emphasized how important, and frankly proud, he is of being a facilitator of the sandbox for individual communities to flourish in. His team has even reached out and recruited almost all of the official Rust server hosts to run Renown servers. “That’s mostly because we’ve provided them the tools… to make that an easy process.” Jesse assured, as well as providing financial compensation for the effort. The goal being that they can use their particular expertise to help modify and regulate game tools and create server climates that can cater to all sorts of players. Maybe I'm not the only one who thinks the grind speed is slow, as there could be a server that picks up the pace or starts players off with kits of goods to get off of the blocks faster. Servers wipe weekly to keep player progress from being insurmountable, but a server can exist where those wipes happen less often, if at all. The Renown team want as close to infinite player adaptability as possible, and they want to be as involved as a server host needs them to be to make it happen. “We think we have a good idea of what makes the most enjoyable gameplay aspect, but we're not going to kid ourselves and think that no one else could think of something better inside of this sandbox, ya know?”
A lot of the ruggedness of Renown’s alpha state is manageable, and is probably even great when you have a dedicated community to play it with. But there are a few pain points that are going to make it a tough sell for people not already bought in for the long haul. I had quite a bit of performance issues when playing – both with the devs and on my own. Framerates jolted and lag really did its best to undermine me when I needed the stability most. The current UI and menus are rough around the edges and inconsistent throughout, some tooltips are arrayed across selection wheels while others sit in lists that are difficult to navigate while in the thick of the action. All of these things are on the list to reform and fix as the development team expands, hopefully before its slated Q3 2025 Early Access launch.
Renown’s crunchy combat has a lot of potential in a genre not known for making close combat an elaborate affair. The basic and sometimes mundane gathering and building game that you have to trudge through to get to cool stuff is very raw and still has a ways to go to meet the quality standard of the games it hopes to compete with. While its dearth of content, stability issues, and ragged UI are strictly RDBK Studios’ responsibility, the community is poised to have a lot of control over the day-to-day experience. Time will tell if the former can come together quickly enough to nurture the latter.
