From the beginning of 2017 til now, this game has on record, the
most participated players of all close beta games in China...
Once upon a time, somewhere in the other end of earth far far away, there was a myth, the myth of ancients, creatures, Gods, technologies, and of course, mankind. This myth is set in a fantasy world of China in a game called Gujian Online
(or also known as Legend of Ancient Swords / Swords of Legend named by other players).Before you read any further, you can check out the screenshots and graphics here. Gujian OL is developed by Aurogon Technology Shanghai, later published by GameBar Inc. (the game official‘s Chinese name is Wangyuan Shengtang, headquartered in Beijing). This month, the game entered its 5th close beta test for three weeks of July. The last close beta happened in June 2016 which was almost little more over a year. The major changes are the huge graphical leap utilizing new technologies, the redesign of character models, the reengineer of the entire combat system (action combat from tab target), new dungeons, improvement of UI, and among other features.
Game Shown at E3 2017:
In this year’s E3 gaming expo, the game decided to take a stab at the global market, the official has named the game “Gujian OL” to finally showed itself to the western audience, and likely in the future that the game will come to the West someday. The game official staffs questioned and took notes of western players’ perspectives about the game. The audience in E3 commented about the fascinating mythical elements they learnt, as well as the nice graphics and the smooth combat.
(GameBar Inc. with their own neat looking booth and models presented in E3)
The Official stated on their billboard in E3:
“Gujian OL is a highly anticipated 3D MMORPG, featuring vivid details of Chinese traditional culture. The game is based on imagined history, combining real sceneries in the real world and Chinese fairy tales.”
Where it came from? How famous? How did this game exist in the first place? Checking on its birth certificate, it’s actually not the first child being born, it’s an online version spin off after the 2nd sequel, from a series of single player games called “Gujian Qitan” (Ancient Swords and Legends). The very first game of the series was released back in 2010, gaining a huge fame in China almost dominating the #1 top rank single player game in the market during that period, over 7 million units sold in one year. Due to the inextinguishable hype that have continued on, comics, novels, Chinese TV dramas, along with other products have taken adaptation from the game. Following up, the 3rd sequel was announced recently to be released in 2018. A film is also currently in production on the way to the big screen.
Strong Chinese Culture, Myths and Folklore:
Although a game with a fantasy world may share similar elements or life in other western games. Story wise and background, what sets this game apart from other already released Asian fantasy MMORPGs in the market? How different is the culture compared to Blade and Soul, Tera, Black Desert, Age of Wushu, Final Fantasy XIV and etc.? The literary illustration of this game is surrounded with more mythical tales and folklore than traditional martial art literature or western fantasies where you have wizards and magic.
To give you some ideas, ever heard of some of the classic stories like Journey to the West? Madame White Snake? Or Ancient Chinese Ghost Tales? This game combines different elements of folk’s legends, such as Chinese Gods, Demi-Gods, demons, ancient Chinese ghost stories, and the concept of reincarnation.
Not to mention, the story about love passing through time
before life to afterlife...
Moreover, religion and belief such as Buddhism, Taoism, temple and monastery are part of the environment. This game explores the ethical conflict in the human society. Some examples of the plots involved:
(A man cultivates oneself by helping and doing good deeds to people, once he passes the test he will reach nirvana. Another story, is a man living a happy life with his family until one day he has a sudden change of personality that makes him kill his whole family and other people in the village, no body know the reason until later find out that he was possessed by a ghost that is cursed of lingering in the world without freedom. And then, you have a story of kind-hearted demon taking a form of human, wishing that she will be like other human beings, having a normal life, which is to find love, get marry, have children and live happily ever after. But no, there’s always a douche who is stereotypical about how demons are all evil and wishes to dispose them from the human society. )
Despite all the folklores that contribute to the major plot, they don’t make up 100% of the content. This game dressed up a layer of fantasy Wuxia, with some magic and western fantasy elements as well, not to mention the air travelling technologies that are very futuristic but taking the form of ancient style to suit the era. The beautiful landscapes on the other hand contain more real world sceneries rather, than what you will find in a fairy tale.
Specs and Settings: This game is very compatible with wide range of PCs. Graphic is optimized from the very low end PC to the high end using 4K. The graphic setting provides plenty of options like texture, post processing, lighting, shadow, clouds, water, antialiasing, etc. Each with its own slider! The slider moves from lowest, low, medium, high, very high, to ultra-setting. You can also move and place the different UIs to wherever you like on your screen (like your health bar, the quest listing area, the mini map, shortcut menus, skill bars, chat windows, etc).
Content
This game is open world with good mix of PvP and PvE content.
Graphics: For information on graphics
, I made a separate article covering the graphics,
please see HERE.
Character customization:
A big leap comparing to the last close beta. I say it’s very similar to Moonlight Blade, where there is a lot of options of available and you can choose to use the sliders or drag with your mouse. Some of the character models are not optimized, you can tell by the hair rendering and the skin texture are kind of poor. It’s not the best of mmos due to only having facial surgery available but no body slider. There are options of choosing the voice for your character like what they have in BnS or Tera, although it’s a small thing but it’s very neat to have and each voice sound very clear and distinctive.
(That’s one ugly #%*$!@ you can create...)
Classes:
There are SIX classes:
-All of which are not gender lock. For those who are fans of Loli characters, sorry no shorty for you.
-All classes are Hybrid, taking on two roles, can be switched back and forth freely throughout the game.
-The two roles each has its own mastery of skills and different stats. You have the freedom of customizing based on which of the two roles you take, not only choosing the skillset but also free to switch between the stat customization.
What are the
hybrid classes?
1. Two of the classes can be the roles switchable to DPS or Tank (Giant sword, spear, dual spears)
2. One class is a summoner, can be the roles switchable to damage output or support. (Staff)
3. One mage class that uses 5 elements of nature for magic, each element is a selective option, which 4. creates different effect for your skills. The mage can be the roles switchable to damage output or support. (Instrumental weapon: harp, zither)
4. One class is full on damage can be the roles switchable to using melee skills or range skills. (Flying sword or swords)
5. One class can be the roles switchable to assassin or support using dark sorcery. (Scythe)
Character Progression So far I have discovered:
-You have your gear (can be crafted, enhanced, refined, etc.) with different pieces of wear (accessories, head piece, upper body armor, boots, main and secondary weapons etc.) and those pieces also define your fashion cosmetics but some fashion in the game are also not defined with your gear otherwise. There are PvE and PvP gear.
-You have a meridian system in place to invest points in stats, both the meridian system and the crafting of scrolls provide skills add-on effects as well.
-You have a spiritual guardian that connects to your character soul, which is also acting like your secondary pet. It plays a huge part of strengthening your character. It is a character development system very similar to the summoning system of a few Final Fantasy games.
Skills and Combat Melee characters are pretty much all action combat, range characters are skillshots and tab targeting combined. Some skills change mechanics between PvE and PvP.
This game pretty much has most of the mechanics you can name of:
Directional dodges, manual block, charge attacks, flying skills, air combat, attack cancelling, crowd controls (stuns, knock up, knock down, pull, ragdoll, etc.), crowd control disables/escapes, buffs, debuffs, and heal. In addition, for mobility, there are attack moves (attack while moving, not apply to all skills but some), and dashes.
It feels like playing Black Desert with the hack and slash. Triggering the action, it is very responsive and smooth as those guys said in E3. I was playing at 200+ ping, with a booster, there’s absolutely no delay of skill activation. When the ping do spike up around 400+, there’s no delay but it introduces robber banding and skipping frames.
Hit Effect...
When we’re talking about hit effects, it’s not just about the visual effect or how smooth the combat is. It’s simply how you feel when you’re hitting something or getting hit. Let’s begin with the sound effect first, it is very nice, you really feel like you’re hammering stuff. Now here comes the thing, the monsters do obey to the effects of your crowd controls but sometimes they are not very reactive to your other attacks. I think Black Desert and Tera have the same problem too sometimes, monsters don’t feel like they’re getting hurt despite all the blood spill and the nice visual effect coming from your skill cast. If you ask me what a good action combat RPG should be, I say hit effect doesn’t just happen on one side, it’s an interaction on both sides.
I tend to favor towards Japanese games for hit effects (Nier: Automata, Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Rising…) or other ones like God of War, I think those are the best in that area. They have a good wide range of attack animations, very natural motions, and the action is intense. Talking about the different reactions, besides the effects from crowd controls, enemies can stagger, their unbalance is triggered, as well as the effect of rebound, particles, and vibration. Voice reactions and different sound effect for different impact of objects should also be considered. Crowd control should not be eternal of course, there should be given a chance of recovery, invincibility, some kind of break in between to strike back. In addition, mobs in mmo rpg games tend to have lower artificial intelligence than single player console games. Combining all of the above elements together with a good variety and range, is what mmo rpg lacks nowadays.
This game has a flying skill for your character to get onto higher grounds. You can work your way to even climb onto a skyscraper-like building in the city.
Life Skill:
Culinary Art and Potion Making are huge in this game. They both require you to collect ingredients for crafting. They play part in combat and their roles are to provide buffs, cures of debuff, heal and other effects to your character. Culinary art contains a cookbook with a list of dishes you can make with classification of different flavours (sweet, sour, bitter, salty, etc.), each providing its own effects. You can do fishing as well as part of collecting some of the ingredients for crafting or you can make money off of them (a fishing rod is not needed but instead there’s an ability for that). There are other life skills but they are gameplay for the casuals, they will be mentioned later in this article.
PvE Content Don’t expect to be a Dynasty Warrior game where you kill monsters like cutting paper or mowing a lawn. Monsters are meaty, they do quite hurt. My character died several times even just from running the main quests from the beginning until late game. The number of heals I’ve had are uncountable.
Monsters in dungeon hurt even more and harder to be shut down, they are not designed for single player and you could imagine how the boss would be. For dungeons, there are three modes to choose from: normal, difficult and heroic. It’s usually 5 people in a squad. There are 10 and 20 people instances. Pretty challenging overall. Even at the very first dungeon on the lowest level that I ran, which is a normal dungeon, my entire team got destroyed 2 times even with a healer on the side. You can’t spam spells, you need to plan out your attacks, like what sequence your skills should follow one after another, what the right time should be to unleash a certain skill or saving a skill for later use. Sometimes there are traps, sub plots, and other props that come along instead of only killing, killing, and killing in a dungeon. Out in the open world, a few world bosses are also made available, some can be done solo while others require you to form a team. Since the dungeons in this game have three different modes mentioned above, you will expect to revisit the place again as you’re leveling up your character. For daily quests, they have town quests for fulfilling reputation such as bounty hunting. The treasure hunting quest is debatable, personally I think it’s forced.
PvP Content
So far of what I’ve seen there’re 1v1, 3v3, 15vs15. There are PvP gears separated from your regular gear.
Questing: Pretty much all the NPCs have voice over with some animations while you’re in first person’s view every time when you’re talking to them and accepting the quests. This happened from the very start of the game to late game. You can tell, this is very detailed work being done here and they really put the effort. The quests are the typical killing and collecting stuff. Nothing new being offered except a few times where you got into some instances and play around with traps. Getting through the traps are pretty challenging, most likely you can died for the first 1 or 2 trials, they should’ve added more of those types of gameplay.
The story and the main quest are LONG. It took me about 2/3 of the way before the close beta ended to max out to level 50. However, it’s never a good idea to rush leveling as this game has dungeons, instances or other PvE events along the way with your main quests that provide good resources for developing your character. Although you can still defeat higher level mobs with the gear obtained from the main quests only, you will eventually find out your damage will fall off quickly and will have to kill the mobs with more effort and be more careful.
Other Contents:
Fashion
You can customize each part of your clothing differently (head piece, upper body wear, weapons, back wear, shoes, etc.). Like mentioned above, gears also define your fashion clothing while some fashion in the game are also not defined by your gear. Each single style of fashion has a set of different colors as well. However, this close beta has very limited unique extraordinary looking fashions available. You will expect a bunch to be shelved in the Cash Shop in the future.
Emotes: Comprised of single person’s or couples’ emos with voice over.
Even your
pethas its own set of emos. You’re looking at a great number here but there really isn’t much variety of pet emos.
Character’s
Profile Picturecan be changed, as well as the frame.
Pets
You have two pets in this game. One is your guardian that spiritually connects with your character. The other one just lives on its own.
Casual Gameplay Content This game has instrumental playing and photography. Nothing to do with combat, they are all casual. Do not overlook these, they offer tons of features. Photography mode contains good options as if you were taking a picture in real life (exposure, flexible movement of camera angels, color adjustments, depth of field, filters, etc).
Instrumental playing has karaoke mode, scoring system, composing music, collecting pieces, playing with selective keys and chords, etc.
You can play duet with another person.
(Karaoke mode and keeping track of your score) (Hunt music sheets in the world and make your own playlist) Compose your own music: there are different tones of instruments available to select: violin, piano, zither, xylophone, drums, cymbal, gong, triangle, etc. Once you play the music, you will hear those tones.
In Conclusion...
Well, is this a NextGen of MMORPG? Simply put, it has a lot of new stuff to offer but at the same time, it has a lot of stuff that already exists in other MMOs.
RatingsI judge this game based on the perspective if it were to take its current quality to open beta. If I rate this game as a close beta where things still need to be optimized and fix, I will add 0.5 points to Art Design, Story, PvE, Questing, Tutorial and Guide.
-- Technical Quality on Graphics 9/10 - they have nice technologies and tools to work with, weather effect, details and textures are great overall. Lost 1 point on color cast and few optimizations.
- Art Design 7.7/10 - Environment and architecture are excellent. Lost points on character model and fashion creativity, objects looked dull sometimes especially under low light situations, shouldn't happen with directx11, it’s about detail management.
- Story 8.5/10 - Good illustration, they have good cutscenes at the beginning but later kind of falls off. Nice creativity on stories but there're still some clichés, something inevitable I guess.
- Combat 8.0/10 - Skills are decent with great varieties of mechanics, performance is responsive, less ping dependant. Lose points on hit effect.
- PvP: N/A – Will not have a fair judgement on this yet, can’t tell s*** if I only played for like 2 matches.
- PvE: 8.0/10 - Challenging dungeons and mobs. Even though they only have few traps, props, and mini games somewhere, it would be nice they implement more mini games. Mobs are bit too tanky sometimes and lack some Ai.
- Lifeskills: 9.5/10 –Life skills related to character development are effective. Life skills that are aim for casual (camera, instrument) are also pretty fun with great features. Fishing is literally AFK until you get a bite. Musical instrumental gameplay is amazing.
- Questing 7/10 - Mobs are challenging for dungeons and daily quests, story is good, NPCs are easy to follow, lost points on repetitiveness. They said they will cut them down in the next build.
- Tutorial + Guide 8/10 - Crafting ingredient locations should be included in the description. Otherwise, their guides pretty much cover everything but lacks little details. They have a pretty good quest tracker.
- Bug Fix and Quality: 9.5/10 - They listen to their community, bug fixes are on weekly basis.
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Current situation if it’s an open beta game: 8.3/10
As a close beta game: 8.6/10Reference: Picture sources are mostly from the Official site: gjol.yy.com, coupled with my own screenshots.