Cons: Dissection of quests into too many mini-quests is really annoying
Revelation Online just went into its third round of closed beta testing, a Chinese developed fantasy MMORPG that is now being brought to the West by publishers My.com; we got a chance to check out the game for a few hours to see if it lived up to the hype and anticipation from the f2p crowd. The game itself is traditional in some aspects with its quest orientated story focused gameplay, but offers exploration of a seamless, loading screen free title (with the exception of a few dungeon and PVP instances). Players have a handful of classes to choose from and for our foray we went with the spellcasting Swordmage; as far as classes go skills unlock as you level up and have a degree of customization in various aspects, such as enhancing your Combat, Special or Aerial skills (yes, there is flying and aerial combat) and the ability to put skill and stat points here and there.
Our first nod of approval with the game was from the character creation menu, there are quite a few sliders, hairstyles, skin tones and other appearance customization options that give players the chance to look a little more original than their peers. With only one human race to choose from though it's likely that those options won't go that far, but the details and differences between hairstyles was at least pretty impressive.
Into the game we can't deny that it looks visually impressive, the world design, lighting effects, character models, animations, it's all pretty great and it immerses you in the world, which we believe is pretty important for a story-driven adventure. The story, and by proxy quests, are at times hit and miss and the game does have that unfortunate back and forth between epic and pointlessly mundane where you ask yourself "Why is my character who just fought off a crap load of demon fish things now serving drinks to people in a tavern?". When it's good then the story is great, when it's not then it's pretty poor. What we did like was that when we went into "story mode", where we were on the main quest line, is that it hid all the other players so it felt like a single player RPG experience, but giving us the option to tab the players making them visible if we wanted to.
However, the biggest frustration with questing is how much a single quest is broken down into a dozen mini quests, where instead of just having waypoints refresh/update as you reach the next stage in the quest instead the game makes you go through the clicky clicky process of completing the process, collecting the rewards, and picking up the next quest instead of just giving you all of these quest rewards at the end of, what most MMORPGs would have as, a single quest. It seems picky and not that big a deal, but after 20 levels of questing we found it extremely annoying, particularly where your "quests" could be within two meters of each other and one quest might be to just "go over there and push the lever", upon completion you then get another quest to go and talk to the person who told you to push the level... completely unnecessary.
From what we experienced so far though we have to say that was probably the worst of our issues, there were other minor gripes like acquiring a mount being futile as your speed running ability was faster than the horse but the horse lacked the ability to jump through the air and glide over walls, etc. Another annoyance was that the first 20 levels of combat being extremely easy and barely presenting a challenge, and in turn a bit boring (apart from a dungeon boss that we were kicking its ass up until it nearly one shotted us, just so an NPC could come and save the day as part of the story, which actually felt cheap and pretty forced). Picking up gear was sporadic and in all honesty pointless, the extra stat boosts we got from it wouldn't have any serious effect on the already easy PVE components.
All that said, whilst the combat was easy (insofar that the mobs didn’t have anywhere near as much damage output as we did) it is probably one of the best combat systems in an MMORPG to date with its fast skill based action focus. The game uses traditional "telegraphs" where red markers appear on the floor and you need to dodge them before the enemy makes its attack in that direction or hits it with an AOE. This forces active dodging (double tap of your directional keys) and at times jumping up to dodge certain abilities, but it's the pace at which these attacks come one after the other, dodging and dodging again quickly to avoid the flurry that made us go "Yeh.. at late game the combat is going to be pretty intense". It does have tab targetting but it is combined with directional attacks, so if we were targeting an enemy that was behind us and tried to attack it with one of our normal spells we'd get the message telling us to face the target, but if we launched our AOE it would just do it where we were facing and miss everything. The Swordmage in particular was extremely fun, a little softer around the edges forced us to dodge a lot more and keep at range, we had the ability to switch between our three elements (Fire, Lightning and Ice) which would change the damage and effects of our different spells; very cool.
Ultimately the question is "is the game worth playing and does it bring anything new to the table?" Whilst it might not be the most original and at a glance some of the class customization doesn't look to be the most diverse, the look and action combat of the game definitely propels it to the top of the list for MMORPGs to keep an eye in 2017. Add into the mix flying, which we only got a taster of during the early game/tutorial area phase of the game we can say it was extremely fluid and very fun, throw in aerial combat and the game has got to be on for a winner.
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