Devilian is a free to play Action RPG MMO originally developed and released in Korea and then published by Trion in the West; with it's typically Asian-fantasy themes the game offers players a long PVE questing experience through a grim-dark realm of monsters and evil. With elements of crafting, the ability to switch forms into a half-Devil creature, and various PVP modes the game, on paper, seems to have a lot to offer and was developed by the same team behind TERA Online. Whilst the game has some great qualities and fun gameplay, there are a few things that really make the game struggle in the genre, so let's take a look and ask "What Would You Change About... Devilian?"
Guild versus Guild PVP doesn't work
One of the big pulls to Devilian for many players is the 20 v 20 PVP battles where organized guilds are able to battle each other to capture and control different points; defeating enemies to grant buffs and many other strategic elements. The problem is that first and foremost the game isn't populated enough to consistently have large guilds, meaning lots of guilds getting involved in the PVP match don't have a full roster and will get absolutely smashed by the handful that do (who, sometimes because of this imbalance, consistently fight in the 20 v "20" Guild PVP). The second issue, that contributes to a lack of player availability, is that the event (as with many Asian developed games) is only unlocked at certain times of day; unfortunately for many players in Europe, particularly more Eastern EU time zones, this can fall close to midnight, meaning that there's even fewer players available to fight. The game needs to not only pull that time forward a little for the event, but also consider drastically reducing the member cap for a guild to closer to 15 we feel, or making it a faction based system where any players can jump in to fight and not limiting it to guilds only.
The Asian Grind™ is dominant
Whilst the game can be fun for the most part, it doesn't take too long until you are doing the same content, the same daily quests, grinding mobs in the same areas due to boring quests, and reaching max level is then just a loop of running the same content over and over trying to get loot drops with randomly rolled stats. The content is the same for every class, so trying out another class for a change of pace becomes very much the same experience, further exacerbated with various key resources/materials being bound to an account (souls, essences, XP books, etc) that don't allow players to trade between their characters to improve them means it is essentially starting completely fresh character each time and playing content that doesn't change. More content, account bound resources and less generic gameplay is needed.
Classes are gender locked
For current MMOs gender locking a class is just such a faux pas, admittedly the developers (Bluehole) managed to get by with this with their other MMORPG TERA Online, which also has gender locked classes. Having spoken at length to the publishers of TERA with various press tours it's always been clear that any time spent trying to give existing classes both genders (or additional races) would be at the expense of creating new classes and more content due to resource availablility. The same excuse really doesn't seem to hold up for Devilian as it's been well over a year since a new class was added to the game; the Tempest, which was a premium/cash only class anyway! Devilian doesn't get anywhere near as much content being added to the game as TERA does and so it would seem like TERA is also using up Devilian's available resources as well, though ironically a lot of the assets, ideas, skills and characters in Devilian are taken from TERA directly.
PVP is based off the tale of Moby Dick
Moby Dick is about the infamous great white whale and the obsessive mission by Captain Ahab to try and kill it, well, spoiler alert, Captain Ahab gets killed by Moby Dick in the end as well as the whale killing every other whaling boat sent to catch him. In Devilian PVP it's practically the same, if you've spent a ton of money on the game (known in F2P industry as a "whale") then it doesn't matter who you face in PVP because no one else stands a chance of beating you in combat. Try and do it for the dailies and just leave it at that (just hope you don't have 3-man pre-made groups constantly queuing, kicking everyone's ass and stopping you from doing even this). To fix it the developers need to balance out gear to a standard level where skill is king, but if they did that then there'd be little to no reason for the "whales" to spend as much as they do if they can't use it to dominate PVP.
These are some of the things that we would change about Devilian, 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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