Swordsman is a free to play MMORPG from Perfect World, developed and published originally for the Asian market this Wuxia themed game sees players rising as martial artists in a world established by famous author Louis Cha in his novel The Smiling, Proud Wanderer. Starting out life as a wandering wushu, players can join one of ten different martial arts schools, take on all manner of PVE focused content suitable for the theme, and fight with other players in PVP. Whilst there are aspects to the game that we enjoy there are a few key things we don’t like.
Dated and Dried Up – Whilst the game is a few years old now in all honesty it has never been at the graphical peak of what we would expect of a modern MMORPG, so everything just looks a little dated and tired overall. Combined with a struggling uncustomizable UI design that doesn’t feel particularly intuitive and the lack of effort that seems to go into adding new content, items, or anything that isn’t instantly put in the cash shop, it really feels like the game is on its last legs waiting to commit seppuku. A little love needs to be put back into the game instead of just letting it dry up and be a money trickle, financially that might not be worth it, but to improve the game it is a necessity.
Grindy Content – Following on from the lack of innovation and dated looks, so too is the actual content concept following a weak “grind” philosophy where the bulk of the mid-level content is about killing thousands of enemies to get quest items or loot drops. Whilst the early game content plays a little more interesting, and power levelling up to around level 40-50 is fairly easy and somewhat fun, the game hits a wall where the rest of the content comes at a snail’s pace. So poor and blatantly grindy is the content that the game has an auto-combat system where the AI takes over your character to do the farming so that players don’t have to stomach it themselves. The grind is a core concept to the game, but we’d like to see more meaningful quests and more content so that developers don’t rely on the grind to keep players busy as opposed to them having fun.
Low Population & Timed Events – It is somewhat of a double edged sword that the game suffers from a low population and because of this events are restricted to set times in the day when they can be activated in the hope that players will gather together at these times to fill the events up. The reality is that generally players’ play-time is what it is, and if an event is on at a time that you don’t/can’t play then you’re rarely going to be able to change that and so just don’t get to experience events. Furthermore there are certain events that can be actively triggered (or not) by leading guilds, tactically some guilds choose not to launch these events and therefore hold content back from other players. Ultimately if players can’t play anything other than the grind content then they’re not going to stick around, and so the efforts in place to keep the population high at set times is ultimately having a counter effect.
Clunky and Easy Combat – The game has three different control systems that players can use (from point and click to WASD), but in giving this option, which we admit is a fairly cool idea, means that it greatly limits how your combat mechanics can work as it has to be viable for all three control methods. The result is a somewhat clunky combat system that just feels awkward at times, which in turn means dumbed down AI and combat so that it isn’t too challenging (combined with the need to grind). Due to this AI is fairly non-existent and enemies are often little more than punching bags to grind quests on; we’d love to see a consolidated and reworked combat system and some actual intelligence in the AI.
These are some of the things that we would change about Swordsman, but what do you think? What would you change about this game? Would you add anything else to the list? We await your opinions! Let us know!!!!!
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