The first beta of Revelation Online is coming to an end soon and we have spent many hours in the colorful world of the Chinese AAA MMO. Read here our conclusion with the highlights and weaknesses of the new online role-playing game.
What a rollercoaster ride! The beta of Revelation Online is ending soon and rarely has a game enchanted and frustrated me so much at the same time! Because the new super MMO in the sky of online role-playing games has a lot of cool ideas and concepts, many of which were either not understood or inadequately presented during the beta.
I don’t understand you!
The biggest problem of Revelation Online in the first beta was certainly the babylonian confusion of languages. Because the game was actually supposed to be released in English for the Western beta, but many of the texts were probably not finished, and so a large part of the content was still in Chinese. Occasionally, we could at least read some Russian texts in Cyrillic, but this language is likely only mastered by a significantly smaller number of players from the local target group.
The lack of localization naturally meant that the game could only be enjoyed rudimentarily. Especially the story, after all a announced highlight of the game, could barely be understood. Why we should do anything and why person X was important was not apparent to us. But the gameplay also suffered from the lack of comprehensibility since many functions of the game could only be guessed because the tooltips were also in Chinese or Russian.
At one point, we could not even complete a quest because we had to give a specific answer in the dialog, but none of the options were decipherable. For the upcoming second beta, the texts should hopefully be fully translated, because I don’t want to go through the language chaos again!
Fly, little angel, fly!
The language dilemma was incredibly annoying and dampened the mood significantly, but apart from that, Revelation offers some really cool features that balance out the annoyance. One of them is our wings. Powerful wings are cool, and it is not without reason that Aion was also a real success for a while because of its flying heroes. But while in NCSoft’s MMO you could only flutter around to a limited extent, our wings in Revelation have no minimum durability and we can glide through the air for as long as we want.
But not only with wings are we highly mobile; as in Blade & Soul, we can perform double jumps, glide through the air, and dash along walls right from the start in the best Kung Fu tradition. Those who master the various key combinations can also pull off some cool stunts. If you prefer to stay on the ground, the good old horse and other mounts are available.
Non-stop action
If we weren’t endlessly following the story in Chinese and didn’t understand a word, we, as action fans, were fully satisfied. Because the combat system of Revelation Online is a blast! We can play the game like WoW, Diablo or Blade & Soul and can change the controls anytime. But no matter how we control our hero, we won’t get far without movement. Standing around and shooting rarely works, and especially mobile classes like our sharpshooter require a lot of attention and control mastery.
Off with the tail, monkey dead!
For that, we can sprint around at will, perform dive rolls and shoot the opponent in the unprotected flank after dodging their spectacular jumping attack. Especially cool: End bosses, like the big “Beast-King”, often have specific weak points. With the aforementioned giant monkey, for example, we can specifically target its tail and amputate the whip at the end!
Dungeons like the refuge of the monkey monster can also be completed alone in story mode, but the instances really rock with a group. We can easily find a team of like-minded people using a group finder that we can activate right at the entrance of the level. In a group, we can then also apply different skills than alone.
For example, our sharpshooter can shoot with a much stronger rifle instead of two pistols. But in rifle mode, we are slow and can hardly dodge. Without a tank and healer, it won’t work. In a group, however, we have a completely different role and fit perfectly into the team.
Drinking enhances character!
However, our personal highlight of the beta was not the combat system or the wings, but a funny idea called “Hot Springs”. This is a kind of wellness temple where we can park our heroes when we take a break, wait for the raid group, or go AFK. When we put our heroes in a pool and consume drinks and snacks, we regularly gain a lot of experience points.
In this way, we can quickly upgrade heroes and save ourselves from annoying grind. Speaking of grind: Throughout the entire beta, we hardly noticed a quest where we had to defeat a large number of monsters or collect a ton of items of one type. Therefore, based on the current state, one cannot really speak of an “Asia grinder”.
There is still much to do!
So much for our conclusion of the beta: Revelation Online is a lot of fun and especially the combat system and the dungeons with the easy group finding are real highlights. Also the cool wings and stunt skills, with which we can stylishly explore the beautiful Asian world. Also exemplary: Technical problems and bugs were not as frequent as we had expected in a beta. The servers ran very stable.
However, many features of the game were not understandable due to the lack of localization and could hardly be discovered or not at all. My.com still has to work very hard to remedy this by the next beta. In addition, the game with its many functions and features absolutely needs an understandable tutorial so that new players are not completely overwhelmed. However, if all this succeeds by the release in 2017, Revelation Online could become a good and motivating online role-playing game.
Even more beta impressions can be found here: Revelation Online – A mix of Aion and Blade & Soul in modern! An initial impression.
If anyone wants guaranteed access to the next beta, they can still get a founder package through the link provided here.
