I look at PIONER not only as an ordinary player, but also as a participant in closed tests who communicated with the development team. In the early stages, we were told about stable funding, foreign partners, and powerful server infrastructure. Today, these words are shattered by reality. Parallels with The Day Before are obvious: the only difference is that that project collapsed in days, while PIONER continues to exist in an extremely contradictory form.
It is worth mentioning the marketing separately. Initially, the game was promoted by specialized journalists and streamers who were genuinely interested in the project. After the transition under the wing of Rostelecom, the vector changed: PIONER began to be advertised by media personalities known for promoting bookmaker companies. This demonstrates a shift in priorities - from working with the target audience to simply mastering the budget.
Moreover, the studio abandoned the Steam audience (where about half a million people added the game to their wishlists) in favor of exclusivity on Rostelecom Games. The result is a peak online of about 1,500 players. This gap between expectations and reality makes you wonder about the winding up of wishlists at the promotion stage.
The team's reaction to criticism is chaotic: some problems are fixed, others are ignored or exacerbated by patches. It seems that the authors either do not see the root of the problems, or consider the current state of the game to be the norm. This material is not just a review, but an analysis of the discrepancy between promises and reality.
Playing on "Slowed Down" Servers
We have a technology that is responsible for network interaction, it is also responsible for voice chat. Without going into technical details, this is the same technology that is used in Valorant from Riot Games. That is, it is designed for very high loads in itself. Therefore, everything is more or less OK with it.
The release was accompanied by a technical collapse. Sales opened with a delay of several hours, but even after that, the servers were "down" until late at night. At the start, only the prologue worked - thanks to its autonomy. Loading the first hub location, the Wandering Pass, greeted players with black screens and crashes. Some of the failures have been eliminated, but the risk of crashing when switching between locations still remains.
Despite statements about a reliable architecture, the servers could not withstand even a modest influx of players. At the same time, chats are practically not working in the game. There is a suspicion that voice and text chats were deliberately disabled in order not to store data under the Yarovaya Law (a similar situation was in League of Legends and Roblox).
The result is the destruction of team interaction. Players are forced to communicate by shooting at walls to indicate the route. For MMO, this is a death sentence.
The network latency is comparable to Escape from Tarkov, but in PIONER it feels sharper. Hit registration often occurs with a delay of half a second: you unload the magazine, and the damage passes with a delay. In PvE, this is annoying, in PvP - it breaks the game.
It is almost impossible to evaluate the PvP component in its current form - the servers are empty. The online is so low that any conclusions are theoretical. This is especially noticeable in the Arena mode. Players simply don't go there. The user remains in the lobby alone, waiting for the team to fill up. The standard waiting timer is about an hour, after which the player is thrown out of the server. But sometimes you can encounter a bug that allows you to exceed this limit and continue to sit in the queue indefinitely.
In addition to the arena, there is an analogue of the extraction shooter ("Dark Zone"). This is a separate zone where players can collect loot, fight each other and complete tasks. There are about a dozen points of interest on the map: resources for crafting, repairing and experience. Theoretically, this is a key platform for PvP, but in practice it is unclaimed. For dozens of sorties, you are unlikely to encounter a player. At the same time, the value of the loot raises questions: the resources there are the same as in calm PvE locations. The risk system is implemented formally: when a player dies, he loses only the found items, but not the equipment. There is no tension.
The situation with the search for dungeons, called "raids" here, looks a little better, but there are enough problems there too. Matchmaking works, but the average waiting time is 10-15 minutes. At the same time, the group selection system does not function correctly. A player may be sent to the wrong raid that he chose. There are only two dungeons in the game, and choosing a specific raid does not guarantee getting into it. Most likely, the game is trying to defuse queues in this way.
All this is aggravated by the lack of anti-cheat. Cheaters pass raids in minutes, while honest players wait at the finish line. In a full-fledged PvP, this would be a disaster, and the low online is a kind of salvation here. You can't complain about the violator either: the report interface is broken, the buttons are not pressed, the cursor disappears.
Is This Really "Native Penates"?
The plot has changed little compared to the tests. It was only expanded: if earlier the narrative was interrupted by a single raid, now the story is formally developing. This did not bring a qualitative shift. The player still acts as the "chosen one" who survived an anomalous surge - the "Tide". The main intrigue revolves around the survival of the character and his role in the conflict, but these topics are practically not disclosed.
The list of factions has also expanded. In addition to the previously known Initiative and the Trade Union - two neutral organizations - three more sides of the conflict have appeared in the game:
- Brigade - a militarized group interested in full control of the island and the restoration of the territorial integrity of Russia;
- Conglomerate - a faction of local savages whose main goal is to expel all newcomers;
- Twilight - a villainous faction that acts as a key opponent, regularly attacking settlements and interfering in the player's actions.
The factional structure here performs not only a plot function. You can join them. They will give their instructions, for the fulfillment of which you can advance up the career ladder. At the same time, the feud of factions is perfectly demonstrated in disputed territories, where wars and skirmishes between players are allowed.
Visually, PIONER resembles Fallout 76: rusty tones, wild nature. At the same time, there are no recognizable Soviet or post-Soviet cities with typical buildings. The world looks whole, but like a homemade civilization made of garbage, secondary.
The main problem of the plot is incompleteness and the laziness of the scriptwriters. For example, according to the plot, all residents of the Wandering Pass suddenly lose their memory of how they repelled the siege of the city. This is an official script move that justifies the lack of changes in the location and new dialogues. Against this background, side quests look advantageous: bandit showdowns and local stories are written much more vividly: help an old man dig up treasure, save a scientist from the clutches of bandits, or help find out the code from the safe - and so on.
MMO for One Person
PIONER is a typical MMO project. The game cycle is built around leveling and searching for equipment. The first is through grinding mobs and quests, the second is through dungeons and getting rewards for levels (for example, at level 10 they give out rare armor).
Leveling comes down to opening perks. The skill tree consists of sets of small chains for specific mechanics: trade, crafting, medicine, anomalies. In practice, the system works poorly. Skills are too narrowly specialized and situational, it is impossible to assemble full-fledged builds. Most perks do not affect either damage or survivability, so leveling does not give a tangible increase in strength.
Four locations with different threat levels are now available in the open world. In terms of gameplay, the tasks in them are typical: find, interact, clean up. One task takes 10-20 minutes. Many quest zones are artificially isolated by barriers: you can get inside only if you have an active task. Before and after its completion, access remains closed.
World events added on release are unplayable: enemies spawn endlessly, there are no shelters, and forced shooting makes melee weapons useless.
The combat system suffers from protracted animations. Healing and using items take too much time for a dynamic MMO shooter - while the character completes the animation, opponents manage to close the distance and finish off the player. PIONER is trying to borrow approaches from tactical simulators, ignoring the fact that the pace and density of battles here are much higher.
The same applies to interaction with anomalies: instead of a quick throw of the bolt, a long animation of the "core" is used here, which makes the player vulnerable. As a result, basic interaction with the environment turns into a protracted and unsafe process that punishes the player not for a mistake, but for the very fact of using the intended mechanics.
But the main "activity" in PIONER is walking. Locations are stretched, there are few teleports. Locations are stretched, there are few teleport stations. After death, the game offers resurrection at the entrance to the quest zone (with repeated passage of the task) or at the nearest outpost, which may be a kilometer away. In both cases, it's all a waste of time.
In addition to the main gameplay cycle, the game features an extensive set of mini-games. There are slot machines in the locations, most of which are built on QTE mechanics. There are local analogues of simple arcades, but the three activities are the most noticeable.
- Card game "Massacre" - a variation of tic-tac-toe on a 3×3 field with sector interception.
- Fishing - QTE mechanics. It looks strange because of the bug: fishing takes place in shallow puddles that you can run on.
- Slot machines (slots) - the ability to lose currency with a tiny chance of getting equipment.
Another important side element of PIONER is the construction of outposts. This is a mandatory infrastructure for crafting, repairing and teleporting. It is uncomfortable to play without them.
The key content is raids for groups of three people. They consist of clearing enemies, platforming sections and battles with bosses. In fact, the working tactic comes down to distracting the boss by one player, while the other two deal damage. The balance raises questions: ordinary opponents constantly join the bosses, turning the battle into chaos. If the group dies, the raid is considered failed.
There are two dungeons in the current version: Bastion and Havenari Manufactory.
- "Manufactory": An interesting set of tasks, but there are no rewards for completing them (only from the boss and hidden chests). Platforming spoils the impression due to anomaly spheres that deal damage and fly along unpredictable trajectories.
- "Bastion": Takes more time, but is poorer in content. Mostly it's walking through corridors and shooting. The boss (a giant beetle) is more difficult than both bosses in the Manufactory: he constantly imposes close combat and calls for reinforcements.
The list of complaints is completed by the in-game store. The sale of cosmetics is already working in the raw project - the developers found resources for this, but there are still no resources for fixing bugs. For example, sometimes an error occurs when changing a character's clothes can lead to a complete loss of equipment. The problem is solved only by restarting the game.
Diagnosis
The release of PIONER in early access turned out to be what many expected. The project actually failed at the start. Attention to the game was formed around scandals, not quality. The audience added the game to the desired, but on release it did not convert into a stable online.
As a result, the community received a mediocre MMO that is lost against the background of competitors and risks going unnoticed by a wide audience. For a project with such ambitions and development time, this is tantamount to defeat.
The community received a mediocre MMO that is lost against the background of competitors. There is no reason to believe that the game will be "fixed". PIONER lost even at the PR campaign stage. They don't know about it on the international market, and within the country the promotion was accompanied by dubious decisions (including suspicions of winding up wishlists by bots).
Perhaps the developers believed in success, but the current state suggests otherwise. Today, PIONER is perceived as a clone of The Day Before, which misled buyers. The most honest solution would be to repeat the path of Fntastic: turning off the servers and a full refund. Supporting the game in its current form will only delay the inevitable.