We spent some time playing Guardians of Divinity this week, a new Asian developed MMORPG coming to North America and Europe that went recently into Closed Beta. We’ll say that there seems to be quite a string of these games launching early this year.

Once more stepping into the game we were greeted with a lot of the features and mechanics that have become traditional to the genre and pretty much expected; automated combat, some form of numerical indicator of power (B.R. rating, or in this case C.P. which we presume was Character Power but it didn’t tell us), three classes (Warrior, Mage and Archer this time) and a string of linear quests that level us up at speed.

The levelling was actually comical as it didn’t feel like it slowed down at any point, there’s 150 quest based levels from what we gather, with players able to exceed the level cap and presumably just keep going forever. So in the early game as we started out with our mage character (no choice on gender, she was locked to female), we were gaining multiple levels every minute, essentially levelling up for handing a quest in. To us it seems kind of silly, whether it’s supposed to make players feel like they are constantly accomplishing something we’re not sure, but for us it just makes the levelling process seem pointless; slow down the levelling, make it take three times longer and reduce the “cap” from 150 to 50… but whatever.

The graphics were at least some of the best we’ve seen for an Asian RPG, immaculately designed, both character models, power effects and environments were all extremely well designed. Another breath of fresh air was the English translations which, surprisingly, seemed to be pretty accurate, albeit the storyline and NPC dialogue was cheesy and badly scripted at times even if it was grammatically correct. The story itself wasn’t much either; Pandora’s Box has been opened and so players as some heavenly descendent have to assemble their team of Deities from the various real world ancient pantheons (Odin, Zeus, Ares, Osiris, etc.) who you complete quests for, fight against, fight with or actually fight as when you temporarily Morph into them and take on new abilities.

The combat was pretty dull and uninspiring, aside from the fact that it was automated, it was generally quick and pretty effortless, our character was always just beyond the level curve in comparison to what we were fighting, so for the 119 levels we managed to get up to pretty much every fight was the same where we’d kill enemies at roughly the same speed, take roughly the same % of damage, and then just move on to the next “quest” to kill more stuff that looks different, but dies just as quickly and requires the same amount of input and technical skill. Even boss fights were a breeze, offering no major changes in mechanics or even slight challenge. Challenges in this game simply revolve around stuff being way too high level to kill or having too many hitpoints; overcoming them often requires a group and so it’s a battle of attrition to see whether you can keep your hitpoints replenished whilst reducing the bosses. There’s no other skill needed, no positioning, no interactive environment elements… just wrecking face on each other until one wins.

PVP took a ridiculous amount of time to unlock, around level 105 or thereabouts, and it was only a standard “Arena” feature where you challenge a rival player and fight them whilst the AI controls their character; it wasn’t worth the wait. The battles are over and done within 10 seconds and are pretty unfulfilling. We can only imagine how expensive it is to stay at the top, at level 119 we had only managed to level our gear up (by spending gold) to around level 50 on average.

Though far from the worst, this game actually lacked a lot of the options of other RPGs, at least at the level ranged we’d reached after 2-3 hours, fewer available events and fewer ways to improve your character, but buying diamonds and VIP status was prompted quite a lot. The entire experience felt the same at level 100 as it did at level 1, the design of the areas were pretty nice throughout, but the slow unlocking of features and available Events being locked behind timed schedules meant that there really was very little to do other than grind through the quests in an automated fashion. As ever if you like Asian RPGs that don’t require much thought or effort then it’s one of the better ones; if you like some depth to your RPGs then you’re going to want to pass on this one.

SCORE

• Pros: Fantastic artwork, strong English translations, relatively stable performance.


• Cons: Linear quests that are extremely overdone, same re-hashed mechanics, automated combat, generally uninspiring and boring gameplay with very little involvement.

Final Score: Still in Beta

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2016 at 4:55 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.