RATINGS:
Graphics: 8.5
Gameplay: 8.5
Sound: 8.5
Overall: 8.5
Pros: Great visuals, comprehensive narrative & simple yet enjoyable gameplay.
Cons: Progression may be too slow for people not familiar with this game type.
We dedicated some of our time to check out Therian Saga, a browser-based free-to-play MMORPG that has just reached open beta stage. In this skill levelling, gear gathering, narrative-biased role-playing game, you enhance your own character and discover more from the world and the NPCs inhabiting it, who seemingly prepare for moving to another continent.
Never having played the MMO before, we threw a first glimpse and started at the very beginning to get an impression of how easy it would be to get into the game and to see what was on offer that would make us want to continue playing.
First of all, we should mention that this type of games isn’t precisely this author’s cup of tea. However, due to the fact that we already playtested and reviewed several of them, we are able to estimate if – in our modest opinion at least – a game is rubbish or a success.
Entering Therian Saga, we were presented some choices to create a new character that would be either female or male. We could pick from a selection of different outward appearances and choose a backdrop we were originating from as well as our initial profession, which gave access to particular skills right from the start. This truly created this classic RPG feeling within us, which was even further underlined throughout gameplay.
Upon stepping into the game world, we were firstly struck by the visuals in general, including character artwork, environmental graphics as well as the common UI – everything in Therian Saga was of high quality, resulting in a considerable lead position in comparison to many other titles in the genre. We were guided by tutorial pop-ups through the starting quests, which in general showed us to navigate around, use new skills and equip gear.
At this early stage, the quests were rather simple, tasking us to explore the area and find new places, etc. and educating us in buying things from a lender. The NPC quest narratives were obviously well considered, similarly the description of different areas we found ourselves in, which once again successfully managed to instil this typical role-playing feeling and although, as we already mentioned before, this kind of browser game isn’t quite our favourite, we still do appreciate fine RPGs!
Therian Saga utilises 2 core concepts common in a lot of other game types: energy/ stamina and travel/ building time. Regarding the first, the majority of actions players are able to perform consume stamina or energy, forcing them to either wait or use the premium currency to restore their energy in case they reach the point where this is completely exhausted but they want to keep playing.
It’s one of the most terrible nuisances with this kind of restricted gameplay when the developing team feels the necessity to deplete the player’s energy at an exaggerated rate to try and oblige them to spend real-world money to be able to keep up their play. With Therian Saga, however, they succeeded in pacing the energy consumption pretty well. Even after having spent 30 minutes actively in game, we were far from being forced to interrupt or stop our play.
The second core element is time. When actions such as travelling to new areas or producing items take real-time to complete, this process is sometimes outrageously prolonged that players are in effect forced to interrupt their session or pay to speed up the action. Once again, the team at Virtys has done quite a fine job in this domain. Even presuming that certain actions may require much more time to complete in the later course of the game, this didn’t impair the gameplay at all in the initial stages.
We had the opportunity of exploring a quest dungeon, engaging in combat and meeting our first companion, all of which was pretty casual and simple to play, but yet startlingly pleasant for somebody who in general doesn’t like to play this kind of games. The title moreover offers a plethora of additional mechanics and features players would expect from an MMO, such as trading, guilds, a global chat and so on, which thoroughly were very well put to practice.
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