Revelation Online CBT Impressions: Janky But Fun

It’s been awhile since I’ve played a raw Closed Beta for an MMORPG, where I try to decipher noise like I’m tuned to a grainy television channel. I’ve grown used to test phases that are more like dirty teases: “the game’s complete but we just want to throw some coal on to keep the hype train going.” Not Revelation Online. Revelation Online’s CBT has reminded me what “test-phase” really means.

Translations are a smorgasbord of Chinese, Russian, and English; NPC’s double-up or disappear depending on their mood; the game drains my CPU like it’s lifting a drain-plug after a bath.

But I had to keep playing.

There was a buzz across the MMORPG community, something that started quiet and grew louder up until the launch of CBT. “Revelation, Revelation, Revelation!” The second-hand peer pressure made me take a sip from the punch bowl and count down the hours until the test servers flickered from red to green. And then I got into the game. And then the truth revealed itself.

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Only China gives you the freedom to make an avatar that personifies who you are deep down inside: a confused bobblehead diva with green skin and lips puckered up for any passerby. Sliders, colors, and body parts can be combined to create ridiculous horrors, or porcelain dolls with a glazed look that says “help me.” It’s entirely up to you. Revelation Online lets you stretch your neck to the stars, and I love it.

But to really become yourself, you have to live comfortably within the virtual world.

Revelation features three control schemes to explore: traditional WASD/tab-targeting, point-and-click, and a pseudo action combat.

It eventually became clear that the preferred control scheme depends on your class. As a healer it’s almost necessary that you pick traditional tab-targeting, so you can lock onto other party members to easily slap band-aids on their wounds. Whereas a caster can use action combat, but something feels off. And that’s because Revelation’s action-combat is a hodgepodge: using your abilities locks onto a single-target rather than being a fluid motion where whatever enemy is in range takes damage.

But melee classes shine under the action-combat system. I played the Blademaster, a swordsman who only wields an oversized claymore for looks, while a shorter katana is their slice-and-dice go-to. It feels great. Maybe not perfectly fluid, but spamming abilities dazzled my eyeballs to keep me from noticing any jarring animations.

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You will use every ability on your hotbar. You’re not just spamming the same twirl-and-whirl—although I imagine the intrepid and patient player could. Instead, you develop a rhythm as you gain abilities, moving across the keyboard like it’s a guitar, playing each note before returning to repeat the chorus. At one point my hand even became sore, overstretched, overworked.

It’s too bad the early game seems designed to keep you out of combat.

Revelation Online has a serious early-game pacing issue. You progress by repeatedly tapping “F,” your interact-with-NPC key. And NPCs love to talk. Maybe there’s a riveting narrative to rival Wu Cheng'en between the Chinese characters I can’t read. But I have my doubts. What I found was dialogue that drags, interspersed with brief moments of questing: “kill two crabs,” which take less than a minute before you’re back on the dialogue coaster. There’s no respite, no moments of zen to practice combat or take in the environment. Just F, F, F, F, F, F…. ad infinitum.

But that’s fine. Because it eventually lets up and you’re given the freedom to peruse the game at your own pace, finally finding the freedom your were promised at the character selection screen.

The mainstay of progression is dailies. You thought dailies were just end-game content, huh? Nope, not anymore—at least not in Revelation Online. Pressing “U” brings up your daily quest menu, which you ought to plow through each day to earn the maximum amount of experience. Dailies aren’t too repetitive; they come in a variety of flavors: dungeons, mob-grinding, guild quests, secret merchant quests, trials, AFK hot-spring leveling, etc. There’s enough so that completing dailies rarely feels tedious.

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What I like about dailies is they force group-play, because most dailies are completed best with other players. And that’s lead me to talk to many players, mainly because the group finder is inept; it's quicker to form a group standing outside the portal to a dungeon. But I like that. It showed me just how active the CBT is. And it’s very active. Revelation Online is far more popular than some circles would have you believe.

And maybe that’s, at least in-part, due to its huge persistent world.

Revelation’s world is imbued with an enormous sense of scale to make you feel tiny and insignificant: from towering mountains to ornate palaces with way too many stairs for the average American. It’s a game that looks pretty in screenshots; some of my own even have a serene quality to them thanks to effective lighting and smart use of blur. But in motion the game shows its blemishes.

There’s a sharpness to the graphics, a dated look when you whip out your magnifying glass, as if someone forgot to use the smoothing tool as they snapped the pieces into place. And some objects are completely discordant, e.g. your own feet don’t touch the ground, while the columns of some buildings hover confidently above the dirt. Revelation Online perpetuates an illusion of harmony at a glance, that quickly dissipates upon closer inspection.

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I still think it looks pretty. But a few tweaks and some more once-overs, and the world could be deserving of every praise I can throw at it. Right now, there’s a level of polish missing. In fact, the entire game can best be summarized as “missing a level of polish,” which can largely be rectified by finishing the game’s translations. Because many of Revelation’s systems make no sense if you can’t read Chinese.

I’ve had to use player-made guides, YouTube videos, and my own inner-detective to figure out just what is going on in Revelation. Crafting and gathering is a convoluted process, relying on its own experience path and menus and details that were overwhelming until I calmed down. Your own character’s progression is a totality of a Path, a Soul grid, Order, crafted Gear, refining crafted gear, skill experience, special skills, and flying skills. And my bags are a deluge of items that I can’t understand.

It’s almost too much, but I like too much. If I wasn’t having fun I wouldn’t be close to max level as of this writing.

Here’s what allows me to overlook Revelation Online’s faults, to cross my fingers that a Western release will smooth out the bumps—use a plunger if you have to (pro-tip for car dents). It all comes back to group-play.

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I died in a dungeon. Because party formation matters—the holy trinity—and bosses are challenging. Oversized gorilla mobs aren’t just tank-and-spanks but rotate through various movesets, requiring attention to actively dodge and counter. You feel your character’s life is threatened when you roll through a hard mode dungeon. It’s made trudging through other aspects of the game worth it. Because I can see what Revelation Online might become at higher levels (when the CBT level restriction isn’t in place).

Despite frustrating pacing, a taxing progression system, and some odd combat idiosyncrasies I had fun playing Revelation Online, and look forward to the game’s full release. It does need work. But I’m giving the game the benefit of the doubt until I’m told it’s the final product.

Revelation Online is a game to be cautiously optimistic about, one that could snare a healthy number of players in its world. I may be one of them.

See our Revelation Online Review Game Page to see user ratings/additional information.