Leg

Superior RPG promised a lot: custom classes, finely tuned recipes and integration... It looked on the surface like it would be a labor of love.

But here are the core issues it has, which almost every RPG slop pack has:

• Early game progression: non-existent. Once again, we are told to not even bother engaging in the pack's core gameplay until we have, ONCE AGAIN, gone through the vanilla progression. Wood->Stone->Iron->Diamond with zero change or customization. This is an instant fail for an RPG pack in my book.

• Early game balance: non-existent. I call this problem "IceAndFire-itus", since it is most commonly seen with that mod: the modpack makes no effort to configure or gate strong enemies; you are just as likely to run into them on day 1, in the spawn area, as you are on day 100, thousands of blocks away. This too is an instant fail. RPGs NEED progression, especially in the enemies you fight.

• Zero keybind configuration: every good modpack should go through and disable unnecessary keybinds, and resolve conflicting ones. This pack makes no effort to do so.

• Custom classes: I wanted to like these, I really did. The concept is there, the effort is there, but in practice I did not enjoy them very much. The ability descriptions are clean and short, which is good, but still I rarely found myself understanding them or being interested in them. Although there are tons of class trees and skills, most trees are just 1 skill repeated over and over, until you branch out into 1 more. For a total of like 4 or 5 per class. Maybe this would work fine if the skills were less niche and easier to understand.

For example, I chose the scout class, since I saw it gains access to a flight ability eventually. For the first few hours of playtime, all it did was give me a chain ability, which was decent, but buggy. Some chains had no collision (I guess they were too long?) and all of the chains had problems interacting with horses (horses get stuck and desynced in them.) Plus using the ability was complicated and difficult to learn.

Also, the beastmaster class was in a separate skill tree for some reason? And though the summons were helpful in combat, they killed wandering traders, my horse, and any innocent animal around them, which ruined that for me as well.

Then I found that they are locking certain classes behind a patreon paywall: that's a scumbag move, sorry.

Overall, the one thing that separates this pack from every other RPG slop-pack is the class trees, which were buggy and not very fun to play with in practice. I have played worse, but I've played better. Not really "Superior".

A vanilla+/RPG pack where everything actually just works.

Progression
Not perfect, there are still enemies that 1 shot you in the early game, but they are rare enough that you learn to avoid them pretty quickly. That said, I would recommend playing with KeepInventory on.

The magic progression ties very well into exploration and mining. Some structures contain amazing loot that will make parts of magic progression a breeze. But you still need some gear to tackle most of them.

Currently stuck trying to find Hoglins in the Nether, as their skin is an important progression item, but they seem to spawn very rarely.

The questbook is well written and does a pretty good job guiding the player. Many items have helpful tooltips that explain how they work, but I would like more of that, since some of the ones that lack explanations anywhere in the pack are also lacking documentation online. Like the weird charms that don't go in charm slots, still no idea what those do.

I love how End Remastered, YUNGs Better structures, and Alex's Caves all enhance the exploration as well. Definitely install Horseman and Passable Foliage if you plan on using horses for anything.

I still hate Create, but the pack doesn't force you to use it that much so far. And you can't remove Create, since it is one of the core mods the pack is built around (it is "integrated" into most structures.)

The magic mods are pretty well integrated, but it is still annoying to have 2 competing spell systems that don't really interact, and require totally separate spell books to use.

Aesthetics
No weird texture packs or shaders. My only complaint here is that it still has the default Minecraft soundtrack, which I never need to hear again after 5000 hours (and which doesn't fit the pack's vibes imo).

Performance/Stability
The pack takes quite some time to start up and load into a world, but once it does, things are pretty smooth. I have a strong PC though, so take that with a grain of salt. I have seen a few weird bugs, like the Siren screen visual effect being stuck there permanently after I killed the Sirens, or the recipe for the Feather Fall thread upgrade in Ars Noveau not workinf at all. But most are minor enough.

Overall this pack is leagues and bounds ahead of anything else I have played from modern minecraft versions (except Inquisitive, which is good in similar ways, but that pack won't even launch for me nowadays...)

At first, this pack is a dream. It immerses you in its world with a perfect texture pack, and enough of a foothold to get started, due to quests and structures. The promise of progression is there.

I picked the Astrologer starting class. It's supposed to be a magic class, which has a spellbook from the getgo. At first, I was spamming Magic Missile from a safe distance for 3 hours just to slowly take down a goblin fort. I figured that my damage was so low because I was supposed to be getting stronger, and hadn't done so yet.

Then I looked into how you are supposed to get stronger. The magic progression mainly requires a generic material, called magic essence or something. But to get it, you need to loot structures and defeat powerful foes.

So, my starting point is well behind the power curve expected to be ready for hostile structures. And, to get stronger, I need to defeat and loot those hostile structures. Seeing the problem here? Best case scenario, you are required to grind world-gen for the structures that actually contain magic essence, and then grind the enemies in those structures with a pitifully weak starter spell for hours. Worst case scenario, the enemies are not cheese-able, in which case you have no chance at all. From the get-go the progression is just unusable, at least for a magic character.

I decided to stick with it anyways, just to see if I could break through that progression wall. I always play with KeepInventory on, because losing all your items is basically resetting your progress in most packs. Turns out, that does not work with the backpacks from this mod. So once I lost everything in my backpack, and could not really use backpacks to carry the 10 billion loot items, I had no more reason to play.

It's a real shame because it's clear that the pack has its heart in the right place, for an RPG pack.

This pack does a couple things very well. It never crashed; it performed well even with high render distance and shaders; there are plenty of challenges throughout the world; and, it actually provided a good enough environment for me to finally learn Create.

But that's where the good things end. In service of creating beautiful, epic screenshots, the terrain is BIG. Navigating this terrain takes a long time, even with gliders. The actual process of travelling is just not very fun as a result. The pack seems to know this, and offers plenty of Waystone towers to let you skip the travel as much as possible.

Unless I am missing something, the progression is basically vanilla for the first portion of the pack. I never felt like I was finding loot or materials that made me stronger than the vanilla tools and armor I crafted. Maybe you have to get deeper into the pack to experience that, but for me it was too slow/unintuitive.

The enemies were pretty tough, given that. Most felt brutally difficult, and I could not complete a dungeon in 1 sitting. Most of them felt almost identical in difficulty. This made the pace of combat also slow, by necessity. So, slow combat and slow exploration.

Finally, the soundtrack is bad. It's nice that it isn't the vanilla soundtrack, but just alternating between the same 2 terraria-esque tracks got really boring really quick. I turned the music off entirely ~6 hours in because I was already sick of it.

I hate to say it, but this is the kind of vanilla+ pack I hate. One that makes you go through all of the vanilla systems you've already done 1000 times in other packs, and just tries to make it all bigger and prettier, at the expense of gameplay.