The initial closed beta for Webzen’s newest MMORPG has just gone live for western audiences. ASTA is a classic themepark fantasy title developed on CryEngine3 where we get to once more buckle up our armor and be the saviours of the known world. Not hearing much about the game we didn’t come into it with much in the way of expectations; but as an Asian MMORPG we were pretty sure it was going to feel like a World of Warcraft clone (as they generally do).

We weren’t wrong.

From the general questing mechanics, the graphics (albeit they were pretty good and probably tweaked more to how WoW is now to how it was back pre-revamp), even the art style with oversized buildings and world objects. It was all very familiar. The opening cinematic wasn’t particularly inspiring, it looked like it had been made, filmed through FRAPS, decompressed, then reuploaded into the game; the quality was awful and actually not particularly representative of the much better cinematics that we see in the game. The cinematic was in “Asian” (probably Korean given that Webzen is behind the title) with subtitles, the same as the game, though as this is the initial beta there’s a chance it may have English dubbed over at release. Either way the translations were, at this stage, awful giving us the combination of exasperated and entertained.

So is the game just another bad WoW ripoff? Surprisingly no.

Yes, practically everything about the game is identical to WoW minus the obvious Asian influences and themes, everything from race design to environment design seems to borrow from some Asian themes. The thing is when we played the game it surprisingly played really well, it was copied to a level that was actually still a fun, interesting and well-designed game (for the most part); it felt AAA and if a player has never played World of Warcraft and so wouldn’t be put off by the obvious similarities, then they could really enjoy the game.

The classes themselves are pretty solid, the classics have been hit with Warrior, Archer, Healer, Rogue and Mage; room for improvement sure, but five classes is generally enough to get going with especially when you get the talent trees opening up at level ten. Combat feels pretty strong, we went with the Mage and getting new skills every level was easy going as the levelling pace isn’t breakneck speed and getting to level 10 actually took us quite some time. Inclusion of an early game ability like teleport, which was a long range blink with a long cooldown, made us feel surprisingly powerful.

The game is predominantly quest focused and for the first zone we were in the region was extremely linear; a single road taking us from the beginning of the zone to the end and the quests neatly lining up for picking up and handing in then guiding us further down the path. The quests were far from inspirational, mostly Kill X number of mob, or LOTS of object interaction quests, looting chests, picking up items, destroying objects, etc. to the point where sometimes it got a little tedious. The big saving grace of questing were the Event quests; in the tutorial starting region (every race has its own starting area) we had three of these Events in total which trigger for everyone in the area a set amount of time after they are previously completed. They follow the same rote where you generally kill around 20 of a certain weaker mob, that introduces a handful of elite mobs, and finally a Boss mob that you have to kill. The great thing is that once the event has triggered these mobs appear in a small location, but by being in the general area the quest is being completed even if you don’t participate and you see your Mob kills filling up in your quest tracker; however, once the Boss is killed the reward you get is based on your total participation and how much damage you dealt to the boss and the mobs leading up to it. We were rewarded with some coin, XP and a Tai Token, which we later found a vendor for and managed to purchase a mount at around level 5 for 1 token! There are other vendors for level 10+ weapons and armor (at least for this region) but the cost in tokens was a lot higher; thankfully the Events repeat and players can do them over and over.

PVE is relatively fun and at around level 8 (we believe) we opened up the Dungeon queue where we could randomly queue to be linked up with other solo players and sent into one of the games dungeons. The dungeon itself was relatively easy and short, killing our way through a dozen or so mobs until we reached a final Boss; a ridiculously tall guy (like three times taller than us), which generally how you identify bosses in the game. Unlike the peons that came before him this guy was actually tough.. really tough; our team wiped twice (resetting him) and nearly a third time with two last players with slivers of health just managing to take him down before falling themselves. It was a fun little experience and nice to be able to try out a group dungeon without needing to meet a bunch of people first.

PVP worked in the same vein, at level 10 the battlegrounds opened up; either a team based point capture, or a “football” game called Ogres Playground. The reality is that this was just Huttball from Star Wars: The Old Republic; from the general idea to the EXTREMELY similar arena layout with various traps, and using the same general rules of pick up the ball and get it into the enemy goal. As a 10 v 10 game it was a little manic, very hard to pick out targets, not much coordination from the team and unfortunately just didn’t feel that fun, though as players get better at the game and cooperate a little better then it might be more fun.

Ultimately the game isn’t a bad title, nothing particularly new and even the key features of the game reel off as a list of features we would now expect to see in MMORPG, the game looks good, it is fun and the only thing we see holding it back from being a big hit in the west is the bad translations and similarities to World of Warcraft.

SCORE

• Pros: Beautifully designed worlds, easy and intuitive gameplay, area public Event quests.


• Cons: Not much that is unique to the game, bad translations into English.

Final Score: TDB

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2015 at 12:15 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.