Recent reviews by [DoP] Kardall

I found it extremely monotonous questing to level up.

Secondary skills are an afterthought. Cooking requires fishing which requires the little Atamatoi or whatever house to be farmed for Salt basically. And you have to fish up fish which the bait is only obtainable by killing mobs or harvesting from resource nodes.

Resource nodes are single-use so you are fighting with the rest of the server, that cuts down on any benefits from it. There is no 'harvesting tree' to increase yields so you basically get RNG'd loot rewards from herb/mining.

Fishing is okay. It's not the greatest system ever, but it's enjoyable to a low level. I just wish you could buy or craft bait. Even being able to convert fish to bait would be something.

One of the big quests they give you makes you reach cooking level 8 to complete. To do this you have to do Fishing which is a stupid road block considering what it takes to do it.

Combat is okay, but doing any action makes your stamina drain. Including healing yourself. If you have a self heal (archer) you can't morph to fast travel or it lowers your stamina. Even if you haven't fought anything. It's a 'combat action' I guess, so it is treated the same way as if you fought an enemy. Dumb.

Exploration quests are only accessible if you flag it in the "N" notification menu, which is off by default. You have to enable a specific zone to get any markers. It's fine until you realize that if you are trying to level and complete them to get XP, you can't see it until you do that task. It should be automatic when you enter a zone.

MSQ levels you too fast from the rewards, and the stretch from one point to another is too great to continue on. There are big droughts where you have to do other tasks in order to continue. XP from monsters is meaningless so it's not a reliable way to farm to the next level bracket in order to continue the MSQ.

If you start day one, you cannot do dungeons forever and get loot. You have to have a currency in order to get the rewards from it. So you end up being weaker for farming dungeons. If you make a tank or healer you will end up hitting your cap on day one after 3 or 4 dungeons and have to wait. Then you only get to do 1-3 dungeons before hitting the cap again.

Extremely restrictive leveling processes and makes it un-enjoyable. I don't know if there is some p2w item that can refresh the points without waiting the refresh timer out, but if there isn't then it is just a supremely bad game design.

If you are super casual and don't care about doing much in any given day, then go for it. It's free. Nothing else you can really expect. But if you have lots of free money to throw at it, I am sure you will get some value out of the game. I wouldn't pay more than $10 for this game. Thankfully it's free with p2w mechanics.

The only benefit, is that getting a certain currency gathering mana-ball things in the world, you can purchase armor/weapon/accessory growth items required to upgrade. So you could potentially farm it and get your gear upgraded from green -> blue -> purple level quality if you are not super hardcore and want to take things slowly. I guess.

Leveling: 4/10
Combat: 6/10
Solo-Play: 5/10
Dungeons: 7/10

Overall, I would give it a 6/10. Play it if you aren't willing to spend money but have other games you play or have other tasks you want to do in life.

Surprisingly refreshing. If you were to replace the cat with a human, I don't think this would be as an enjoyable of a game. It would be too much like any other exploration puzzle game. I am extremely surprised at how much fun it is just running around as a cat vs. someone climbing like in Assassins Creed for example.

When comparing games of this Genre nowadays, you have to take a look at how they do the same tasks.

Compared to Fortnite and PUBG, i think that the looting system is far more intuitive in Ring of Elysium, the normal guns make it more engaging, and not having a super jump style gameplay makes it more enjoyable while traversing the environment.

The lack of Building is something I do not miss either. The only downfall, is their Season system is pretty pointless. There is absolutely no reason to participate in any of the unlockable sections in the seasonal ladder. They do nothing for your character, it's purely account based. Almost all of it is simply costmetic, and things like Menu's and Avatar Icons.

Overall, would recomment for an interesting experience of the Battle Royale genre, but not for any competitive PvP type of action.

After trying the game back in 2015 with a Media account, I was impressed with the state of development, but the game wasn't quite 'there' yet, so I gave it a little while to mature and become more fleshed out.

Fast forward to when Release 50 came out, and the free trial was introduced. It gave me the opportunity to really give the game a real testing, and see how it compared to my other Ultima game experiences.

After having played Ultima Online for many many years, I can say that this game truely stands up to the Ultima Series as a Spiritual Successor. The development team is responsive to the community they are making the game for, and seeing as there's no massive company to tell them what direction to take the game, I don't see that changing after launche. Unlike most other games published by say EA or Cryptic have in the past.

While there is still much to go as far as content for the players who have been playing since day one (in 2014), a new player that is coming into the game now will have many hours of game play and story to experience. For a free trial account, your skills are capped at level 50. Which don't take that long to do if you seriously sit down and work on it. But I would assume that if you are that serious about playing the game, you intend on buying it at any rate.

I had originally planned to do the trial, but in a couple weeks when I predicted I would cap out the trial account skills, I would then purchase a copy. This lasted about 1 1/2 weeks before I capped out the skills that I wanted for my own character, then bought a copy.

You have no need to do the quests in the game, and you can practically level everything by killing mobs. However, the quests do give you a nice chunk of XP and it makes the skill gains a lot nicer with a lot of XP in your 'pool'.

The crafting system is strong in this game. You can discover new recipes by salvaging items, gain recipes by looting them (sometimes it's the only way to get a certain recipe), or you can learn recipes from other players in a trade. (They can teach them to you). So there are many options. Some recipes, you can even throw the items you 'think' it takes to make the item into the crafting window from your inventory, and if it matches a recipe you will automatically discover it without having to buy the recipe from a vendor. Very cool.

Some of the skills in the game seem very niche to certain styles of game play, but overall I think they are fairly balanced. If you put the time into developing your character how you like to play, you should be able to help out in groups with most content.

The housing system is staggering. Simply amazing. Spared no expense. The ability to place items in the game by drag and drop, and rotating them is very handy and intuitive when decorating houses. If you enjoy decorating houses, you would love this game, simply for the freedom of placement options available.

From a programming perspective, the API Portalarium is making public is only getting better. As the game matures I am predicting great things and flexibility on the access to information within the game.

While the Questing system needs a bit of work, you can generally go around and do quests. There is a compass in the style of Skyrim at the top with blue sparkly heads for quest targets to help guide you. You can turn them off if you desire which is nice. You have to talk to most NPCs and ask them their name for their name to be displayed above their head, otherwise that npc could be called "Villager" or "Town Guard" forever to you. Pretty cool.

The Guild System interlinks with the housing so seamlessly. You can even have guild vendors in your town/cities that the player owns (Player Owned Towns or POT), where anyone in the guild can add items to it for people to sell. For example, the guild I am in has one at the docks you arrive at, and you can place an item to sell on the vendor that people will likely visit first right off the boat. That in itself removes the cost of entry into the housing system. You can live in a POT as a "tennant" and possibly pay rent to the guild for a room in the Inn. You can customize the interior of said room like it was your own house.

Overall, I think that this game is well worth even the CAD$40 it costs for pre-order. Even if you don't play it often, you can build your character up by pooling your experience over the course of a week or two, then in an hour you can bang out a skill using the pooled experience. The more you have pooled, the faster it goes. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a different game play experience than the standard tab target, with a community and environment that matched my expectations coming from Ultima Online. Very very community driven game.

Limiting discoveries to that extent is a bit much.

You get maybe 30 discoveries before you have to pay money or wait... it takes you 0.3hrs to hit cap. Then I un-installed...

After passing 200 minutes and hitting level 10. I found a few things I liked, but quite a few I don't like about this game so far.

Controls

Controls seem rather stiff. You can increase the camera speed, but it still doesn't feel super responsive. It's like you have some kind of physics thing when you turn your camera. You can even get your character to have some kind of spin effect if you flick the mouse to turn 180 degrees really fast while mounted.

Graphics

For CryEngine, kind of disappointing, but overall it's fine. The environments might be somewhat lacking in a lot of areas, but the mobs are pretty well detailed, and whenever there is an objective for a quest that involves the environment then that piece is very well modelled. (example; crystals or ritual locations)

Combat

I only used the action combat, because if they can get the action combat down, then the other way of playing probably works fine for the two classes that use it. The main problem I have with this system, is that it's "action" but not really. It still targets a mob and unless an ability has splash damage, you are only actually hitting one mob. You have a sword that swings, but it passes through any mob around your target without effect. Kind of misleading system. Should just call it a "Camera Lock Mode" instead of "Action Mode". You hold Alt to toggle mouse controls so you can click things.

Mounting

While mounting is fun, you have to right click on the mount icon by your buffs in order to dismount manually. You can't just re-use the same mount to dismount. Sometimes the flying ones are annoying because you might be outside the town but they don't say it's a no flying area. They just simply tell you that the altitude is too high for your mount. You can still walk with the mount but when you hit something in the terrain (like a broken step chunk on the ground) and your mount runs over it, it tries to "fly" and dismounts you. Frustrating.

Questing

Questing is pretty standard, and a lot of hand-holding is in place here. Good for beginner MMO players, because they won't get lost easily. The coloured areas on the minimap come in handy if you are unsure of where to go. However, the markers for mobs needs improvement. Right now they are X's on the map. I find myself just running around with a mount looking for orange triangles rather than looking at the map. Seems more efficient.

Chat Interface

The Gold Spam must stop. You can't ignore people because by the time you want to type their name, the screen is scrolled and you can't see their name anymore. Of course they are picking random names, so you can't read them super fast, there is no right click -> Ignore functionality. Please put this in the game. I have not had the need to use the chat to talk to anyone. Since most people either speak another language or they are already in groups. Most of the quest mobs give credit as long as you do a certain level of damage to it or tag it even, so a group really isn't necessary. Hence, not immediate demand to use the chat system. I would think that maybe if they have raids/dungeons that it would be good for that, but otherwise just hide it during leveling.

Overall

I would recommend this to new players to MMO's. There are enough variations to make it semi-unique from other popular games out there. It would at least give someone a chance to learn what they do or do not like about MMO's.

I don't want to go into any of the story, because if you enjoy playing the game, you usually either will love the story and the game becomes that much enjoyable, or you don't care about the story and it doesn't matter because the gameplay is designed well.

I found the controls a 7/10 overall. There needs to be some improvements done, but it probably won't be done. The designers have made the controls this way, and if you like it you like it. It's up to you to decide if it's enjoyable enough with its quirks to let some of the bad marks against it, put the game into the garbage bin in your collection.