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Recent reviews by [o.0]LonelyWolf

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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
983.4 hrs on record (0.5 hrs at review time)
65 hours in pre-tests before writing this review.

The best visuals + audio design I've ever seen in a MMO. Top quality right there. Mining a vein, chopping a tree in various landscapes feels incredibly good. Feels like playing good old school singleplayer RPGs but at AAA+ quality.

Do you like sandbox MMOs without classes, easy respecs between playstyles, heavy focus on crafting with a big plus on immersion? Then get this game. No subscription, no p2w, action combat, player driven economy and map conquering, lots of pve and pvp activities. Gathering and crafting are super addictive.

Just get it. I'll get some time to update this review later. Got lots of Runescape-ish vibes in terms of player freedom.
Posted 27 September, 2021.
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238 people found this review helpful
10 people found this review funny
11
2
2
2
5
114.8 hrs on record (64.9 hrs at review time)
I've played this game on PC and Android and enjoyed it until the cheating and hacking just COMPLETELY RUINED my experience. As I am typing this review, I just finished a 30 player killing spree in the Bicheon Valley 3F on 1 single Darksteel vein of yellow quality. Nobody fought back. They kept teleporting instantly back INSIDE the vein (making targeting extremely hard). So after I killed every teleport bot and sent them to town, I started mining darksteel to continue upgrading my gear and while I was mining, on peacefull, 3 bots instantly teleported inside the vein (one of them even was red PK status, so TPs are legit unavailable to them) and somehow cancelled my mining process mid swing (no attacks as I don't have retailate set to on).

So I proceed killing them. again. and again. and again. I spammed my own guilds wall with my kills. Then I mine for 1 minute, I get interrupted again by the teleporter bots.

Now, here I am complete red status, my XP gain nerfed by 70%, can no longer fast travel and to regain my clear PK status I have to kill approximately 7500 monsters of level +-5 of my own. Plus, everytime I die, I drop a good chunk of my items on the ground.

The chinese spam bots make it super helpful for you instructing on the global chat where to join and buy these cheats. Which I find even more funny because I am now watching 2 cheaters mining and interrupting themselves constantly on the same vein. So they paid money, nobody is mining, nobody is looking at it, killing them makes no difference than to penalize you as they magically can take ownership of the vein by bugging your game client (the mine button becomes also unresponsive, you have to walk 5m then come back to be able to re-claim it after killing them).

Are there other ways to mine darksteel? Yes, very inefficient but they are.
Can you enjoy the game post 40 level without darksteel? No, you need boatloads of quantities to upgrade and craft better gear. Gear that can fail the upgrade process. Gear that can catastrophically fail the crafting process making you lose said gear on top of currencies. It is a korean MMO at heart, so there is real grind in this game.
Is PvP enjoyable? Yes, as long as you aren't facing the other type of cheaters -> they use speed and small distance teleport hacks, no cooldown on abilities, no mana consumption. They basically can do 5x your damage per second due to that while being extremely hard to hit or catch if they are running faster than the game design intended.

As a bonus of the cheating being outright blatant, the developer has closed a good chunk of European and Asian servers, without merging them. Straight out closing and deleting everything on them. I've had a couple of characters on the older EU servers before I decided to stick to EU23, they are all gone. Amazing. Imagine having also paid stuff for those characters in the cash shop. The economy of those servers was so unbalanced that they decided to delete everything.

As a bonus, auction house is also dead, there are only sellers. Minimum price is 10gold per item/stack. I've put up all my blue materials and gear at the lowest possible price. Nothing sold in a week. The catch? you can only buy and sell on the auction house with gold - the hard currency. So somebody has to purchase in-game money to be able to buy stuff from other players to begin the trading chains. It ain't happening as people buy gold from 3rd party sites (and get banned) cheaper than what the developer is offering. Others just bot and cheat. Funny, as the game has official bot embedded into it (auto combat and gathering), but on hard content like dungeons and raids you have to assume some manual control in order to not die every minute - and still people make "better" bots.

So, even if you wanna play this game as a legit MMO (with an Android UI and attrocious control scheme) I still can't recommend it for "end-game" as it will take you years to reach level 110 (the max level) and be the only player on the server, still with crap gear.

Now I initially decided to play it as an alternative to main stream MMOs while waiting for other games in this genre to release. But after seeing that highlevel maps are dead as a doornail and 90% of the server are busy AFKing and teleporting between darksteel node vein spawns, it has officially kill any kind of drive to force myself to enjoy this game.

It is a great timewaster, I will give you that. Nothing kept me more engaged since the age of PvP browser games. It's 3 AM in the morning, tomorow I gotta wake up for work, I just came home from a wedding and I'm legit tired and sleepy, but I needed to finish up this review and stop you, the reader, for wasting tens or hundreds of hours on this game in case it clicks with you. Don't. Better get a singleplayer RPG or play anything else.
Posted 13 September, 2021.
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366 people found this review helpful
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10
12
3
3
2
11
8.2 hrs on record
I've been waiting for some time for this game to release on PC and get a chance to give it a go, being starved for MMOs for quite some time. Having no prior Bless game related knowledge and didn't read about anything related to the game to keep it fresh when it launches. I played it until I realized I am not getting enjoyment in it's current state:

- General feel: It's an unfinished console port, the UI is a mess to navigate or use, terrible user experience browsing the menus. The game runs fine on my high end rig and looks nice, but the controls are attrocious

- Crafting: I quickly realized that simply gathering materials in order to craft is the most tedious thing in existence. It is impossible (read as a complete waste of time) to keep crafting in-line with leveling. Best to keep it for max level and simply ignore gathering nodes. The first items you can craft are easy to make, but they are objectively useless as well. You "quickly" unlock decent decent gear but it requires you to defeat world bosses or elite enemies for the materials. You need 1 material per craft, the item is not 100% drop chance (i had to defeat 6 elites to get a damn material from the grassland ogre), fights are long and sometimes the respawn timer iis attrocious. You can use Z to swap channels and find a zone that has it spawned, kill it, get 0 useful loot and repeat. All of this in my attempt to reach crafting level 5 to make some decent armors or weapons. Of course, you can craft the lowest tier item for xp which doesn't need boss items, but the gathering is also plagued by low drop chances. It's pretty clear it was made as an awful grind - just ignore it altogether, you get better rewards from following the main quest or grind the 2p/5p dungeons. The effort and time that is to be spent on crafting simply doesn't cover the leveling speed

- Gathering: plants, ores, trees are plentiful. Skins, cloths nope. They are drops, about 1/6 drop rate per mob on average. Same as boss materials. Rare materials are even rarer of course. Now I wouldn't mind working for my crafting skillups, but after 30 minutes of extensive gathering for skins and cloths I managed to create 3 items. Because you need 10+ per craft. That means either gather 10+ nodes (1 per node) or kill 50+ mobs. For just 1 item that is almost worthless, just to grind that skill up a bit.

- Economy: gold is plentiful and as useless as well. The real currency is Star Seeds, which you can buy from the shop, daily exchange gold -> star seed with a very low cap (but it gets higher for higher level characters). This currency is used at the auction house / market to buy from other players or for selling items you can get this one. So with a few hundred bucks you'll be able to fully deck a character later down the line, then complain there is no content.

- Combat: no animation cancelling, no ability queuing, very long animations in general. All 3 of them together combined (go captain planet) result in combat that looks good but feels clunky. I played Ranger, which is a very good overall class, but the amount of times dodging, pressing V to full charge attacks, trying to chug a potion or cast an AoE skill and not registering, even though it felt natural in the flow of combat to be able to do these actions, is high. Or the amount of times I fire 1-2 extra shots after the mob is already dead - same high. You have to wait between 1 or 2 seconds between attacks to properly play. Not reactive enough for my taste and it feels super slow.

- Inventory: easy to manage at first, but quickly becomes item-hell. You can loot treasure chests in the world, then redeem for +1 bag space. I love this mechanic, but the amount of items you get once you pass level 10 keeps exploding. Repeateble quest items for reputation, materials for all crafting, items for the blessings of all other classes, potions, 50 types of food, augment runes, and the list goes on. It looks like you won't be able to fully enjoy the game without buying some item slots of going multi account. The warehouse (bank) storage is abysmal. You can't craft or turn in quest items with said items in the bank. Just one word: hell to manage.

- Group content: took me a while to realize Matchmaking can be used for 2p or 5p dungeon runs. I enjoyed them. Combat is fun, encounters are engaging, loot at the end... so-so. If you want a weapon because it's an upgrade, prepare to do some runs.... many.. depending on your luck. For me it was easier to grind bosses and materials and craft myself the upgrades - and I didn't enjoy it. I felt tired after finally getting decent weapons, not excited...

- Quests: generic and simple. Rarely some more engaging / fun - the Bard one is my favorite as it's super cute. Make sure you do side quests, otherwise you are getting left out.

- Open World: this is a bit in-between, let me segregate it into 2 parts
- Open World PvE: anything but end-game zones, pure PvE. Lots of activities, resetting quests, elites, raid bosses. The map is constantly overflowing with activity. I felt like in RIFT, where every zone had something for me to do 24/7 and I love it. However, you don't scale down in terms of power or rewards, so level 5 world bosses quickly become worth 0 interest for you as a high level. RIFT solved that through scaling and everyone could get decent rewards for their current progression by using currenices, but here, nope. You can go back and help the newbies, but you won't be getting much in return, just fun, but after 10 kills, that dissipates as well.
- Open world PvP: end zones you are always killable by other players. You can purchase PvP immunity scrolls so you can PvE freely, but it gets expensive FAAAST. If you don't like getting ganked and are a PvE carebear, you won't have a great time. If you like PvPing and or being a jerk in general, you will have fun until everybody quits. Standard Open world PvP with mandatory flagging, with some fame/notoriety basic system that doesn't do that much.

- Real money shop: it has 10 tabs. I guess I shouldn't go further. Boosters on top of boosters, packs, limited deals, cosmetics which are out of the fantasy world and plenty of gacha that don't even give you stuff you are interested in. As a Ranger, I got blessing soul fragments for all other classes BUT ranger. I stopped after 5 draws. The store in general pollutes your inventory with % coupons. I feel like I am going to Wallmart with a deck of 70 coupons that don't stack. It's not even accessible. You won't get many places with casual spending. It's made for cash-grabs / whales targets and for people who are almost 24/7 online. Standard f2p mobile game mechanics, it has them all.

So, should you get it?

- Are you planning on casually doing the story without getting too involved? Are you planning on playing this as a singleplayer experience and maybe with some Matchmaking in between just to see how the game fares? Then YES - it's free, it has content, you can easily burn 20-60 hours until the points form above start to kick in your teeth (sooner or later, depends on your personality).

- Are you looking for a long term investment, expecting to have a good time at end-game and have fun along the way playing the multitude of game systems and classes? Then NO, taking into consideration the bullet points above, it will feel very painful.
Posted 10 August, 2021. Last edited 11 August, 2021.
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260 people found this review helpful
18 people found this review funny
2,069.9 hrs on record (1,988.5 hrs at review time)
Disclaimer: thousands of hours sunk into this game - many more than displayed on Steam, top pve, pvp and misc (collections, artifacts, achievements, AH, etc) competitor.

This is one of the most fun MMOs that existed on the market. Community was more awesome than vanilla WoW. Ruined by extreme greed once Trion realized they won't be number one since they added cash shop. Game is dead, obscene grinds, and full swing PTW. And trust me, I've had my shares of grinds (proud owner of The Insane title in wow amongst other pointless grinds in other mmos).

Desperately needs a new game engine since 2012... Terrible performance disregarding true computer power.

Too bad RIFT, you were a true brilliant gem. The class complexity and flexibility developed by awesome designers.. I will never forget you. You had everything for everyone. Including true player & guild housing.

I've sunk hundreds of dollars on subscriptions and XYZ editions. Wanted to see you shine, but as long as Trion isn't changing it's management into something better, I'm left alone, shedding a single tear thinking about some awesome moments we've had together.

May you rest in peace.
Posted 9 March, 2018. Last edited 9 March, 2018.
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Showing 1-4 of 4 entries