Bitcraft is a tech demo, don't expect too much from it
A few weeks ago I saw a video about bitcraft, and combined with what I already knew about the game, I decided to buy it. Now, 10 hours in, I have had enough.
I knew there was an aspect of tech demo to the game, and I am very interested in the tech as well, but it just became too obvious to ignore that bitcraft is like 90% tech demo, 10% game.
I would love to give more constructive criticism, but the issue of the game is that there is no game design. After every individual play session, I came to the same conclusion: there is no game design involved in this game. Every aspect of the game is just a system that was implemented without cohesiveness or direction as to the impact it would make to the player's experience.
Playing it gives you the impression that at the start of the development someone made a list of all of the systems that MMORPGs typically have and from them on they just got a team to develop and check every item on that list.
To give you an example of this, I'd recommend you open any gameplay video of BitCraft, and watch the minimap for 15s then pause the video and try to correlate what is in the minimap with what is on the screen.
Here are a couple of screenshots for those of you that don't want to go look for a video:
Icons don't follow any proportion, making the map completely unusable to understand how far away things are. The terrain is not represented in the map, obstacles/barriers are not visible in the map, the icons overlap each other and the only icon with a different color is the red triangle which indicates an aggressive enemy, but the map is so incredibly poorly designed that other than knowing an enemy is around, you can't really figure out how far away and on which direction it is.
I know this is just one example, but I think it is really emblematic of the entire gameplay experience.
It pains me to say this because playing it made me realize BitCraft is pretty much the exact game I would make if someone told me I had to develop an MMORPG. It must have been a blast for the engineers developing all of the tech and I would have loved to be a part of the team, but I can't imagine BitCraft being a sustainable MMORPG if their release version looks anything like what it is today.
Posted Nov 1, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC