We’ve put our time in and had a good play of United Front Games’ action sandbox multiplayer Triad Wars, stepping up as a prospective future leader of the Hong Kong Triad; building up from small beginnings with your own Turf players can explore a large city environment and take on each other’s’ territory in Raids. The game has a lot of great qualities and overall is extremely fun, but there are a handful of things right now that we’d love to see changed or implemented to really give the game some staying power. So, these are the things we would change about Triad Wars.

• More PVP - The game doesn’t feel like an online game. Triad Wars finds itself in a very odd/different position, 90% of the game is solo content and plays like a single player game, such as its predecessor Sleeping Dogs did (though that was actually a single player game). The Turf feature allows you to build up your own territory, giving you an income as a player that you can then spend to heal yourself up when roaming the sandbox environment, but more often than not it’s simply to put money back into the Turf as a self-sustaining mechanic. When it comes to the Turf feature the enjoyment doesn’t really lie in the building up your own territory, at least not for us, but in fighting through someone else’s… but it’s still single player content with the rivals players Enforcer character being controlled by AI… and honestly… it’s not the best fighting element in the game anyway so it doesn’t add that much to the experience. What we’d like to see (in an ideal world) is open world PVP, or at least faction controlled Turf where you can have some Faction v Faction battles if you’re in the enemy area.


• Co-Op - It’s nice to play with people. Touching on from the above, the game never calls itself an MMO, but it is definitely a multiplayer and so we think it’s definitely lacking that there’s not even any way to play with your friends; which for us is the mark of a real multiplayer game. The Devs have eluded to the fact that some form of Co-op might come into the game, but we’d say it’s a big priority that needs to tackled sooner rather than later. As a single player game it’s fun, but there’s better sandbox games out there right now with Grand Theft Auto being an obvious comparison, but even the free to play APB Reloaded has a lot of what Triad Wars lacks (albeit the graphics and cinematic gameplay with Triad Wars is amazing in comparison and APB’s environments and world don’t feel anywhere near as alive). If the game is going to stand out as a multiplayer game then it needs these elements, particularly the ability to work with other players on missions.


• Open World Limitations - People and vehicles are just fodder. You can steal any vehicle, you can smash a passing pedestrian through a window or fire off your twelve gauge into a taxi just for the lols, but other than the unnecessary violence there’s not much of a benefit for doing so. You can’t make extra cash from mugging people, or turn in those hot rides that you discover to either cash them in or store them, the open world exists just to be an open world and lacks a lot of real world functionality other than everything being there to kill and destroy, whether on purpose or by accident. We won’t deny that the city design is pretty great, lots of little areas that you can discover, but the game really needs some additional elements to the open world to make it more than an interesting way to get from point A to point B.


• Companion App - An app to deal with the micromanaging. The main gameplay focuses on the open world aspects with doing missions and generally exploring the city, but the Turf aspect of upgrading your buildings, emptying storage, managing Favors, these are all things that take up a little time but could easily be done from a Companion App so that when you do get into game you get to focus on the action. Furthermore some sort of alert to let you know a Raid on their turf is happening could give players a chance to organize some defenses, rearrange some of their Favors, and let players have a more active role in the defending of their Turf.


• Notoriety/Reputation System - Forgive and forget. The problem with the game for us is that the open world rampaging is just too tempting sometimes that you find yourself being pulled into it a lot, you go on a spree and if you manage to get away then all is forgotten, no matter if you just gunned down half of Hong Kong. Whilst you should stop getting pursued (and the AI is pretty relentless, it’s near impossible to hide and the only way to get away is get out of their rather large circle of awareness) they should still be looking for you, you should have a much longer timer before your face is forgotten, they should put up roadblocks and patrol the area you were last seen in, and if you get too close to the police then they start chasing you all over again.

These are some of the things that we would change about Triad Wars, 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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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2015 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.