Introduction

Here we go, the first days of the CBT1 of Revelation Online are done and this my First Impression about the game. After fighting against the queue and server downs I was able to play for ~6 hours straight. In my time playing I checked out the classes, the character creation and started my Occultist. Following the main quest in combination with so called trial quest I was able to reach level 40 in no time. I was told that is when the endgame of Revelation Online starts.

Currently the max. level is 79 but for the CBT1 it was capped to 49 instead and Oh Boy… the game has a long way ahead until the actual release but one step at a time.

State of the Game

I want to be honest with you… playing Revelation Online felt like playing on a bad private server… don’t get me wrong, the combat is one of the best I’ve ever seen but the game has countless bugs, 85% is still written in Chinese with another 10% written in Russian (I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHY IT IS IN RUSSIAN!) while 5% is translated into English. That would be fine if only quests would affected but there are so many Interface options, skills and items or even the dungeon menus and the crafting…
I have reached a point where I opened a new option for my skills but I cannot do anything as I cannot read Russian nor Chinese…

In addition, to the extremely bad localization, the game has a huge memory leak that requires restarting every few hours. As Revelation Online uses some kind of phasing system for a lot of the quests NPCs spawn multiple times and stack in each other…

In my humble opinion, they should have called this Alpha Test instead of Beta Test. Yes, it is true that the game itself is working but for non Chinese/Russian speaking hybrids in addition to the bugs that are in the game… no comment!
I don’t see any NA/EU release before the end of 2017, if they want to do it right, but we will see!

Interface

But don’t get me wrong, not everything is bad in Revelation Online. The basic Interface is one of the best I have ever seen and there is a possibility that I missed some Interface Features as I cannot activate them as they are written in Chinese…

Target of Target, Distance to Target, Detailed Skill Descriptions, Aggro Meter, Damage Meter, Detailed Stat Descriptions… just to name of few.

For a non modded Interface I really have to praise the guys that made it. Sure, there are always more things you could add to your Interface but the important core features are all there

Graphic and Sound

The Graphic of Revelation Online can be compared to Blade and Soul. The overall looks feels very Asian. While the textures are lacking, the equipment is fairly detailed and nice to look at.

Looking worse like e.g. Black Desert Online, the lower graphic has also it pros, before the Memory Leak kicks in the game runs extremely well with high FPS regardless of the amount of players. Overall I’d say that the balance between FPS and graphic quality is okay.

For the sounds… well the music is working the sound effects of the skill fitting in but every two seconds you get chinesed… which results in most people turning of the sound fairly quickly.

Classes & Skill System

Like earlier said, thanks to the Ru/Cn mix I wasn’t able to check out everything thing about the skill menus but what I was able to see surprised me a lot. Revelation Online features detailed skill text like any MMO should have them. Not only including a brief description but showing scalings, range and form of the skill.

With the game featuring, thanks god, the Holy Trinity, a class can based on their build take various task. Thanks to that and the ability to save a certain build it is extremely easy to switch between builds based on your group or that you are currently doing in general.

The classes gameplay varies a lot. Each of them has a total of 16 skills which, as far as I know (currently that part in Cn/Ru) have different available branches based on your own playstyle. Combined the the free stat allocation you can create a character that fits your needs.

I don’t want to go into much details about the classes as this is planned for later, once I have played all of them, but at least give I want to give you a brief overview about all of them. By the way, there is no genderlock in Revenlation Online.

The Vanguard is the main tank. His skill are mainly based on surviving and on CC.

The Swordmage is the main caster in Revelation Online. He uses some kind of elemental combo system that based on his active element changes the effects of the skills.

The Occultist an offensive support hybrid that can switch into a healing stance to support the groups mainheal in critical situattion. He is also capable of debuffing the enemies.

The Gunslinger is all about damage. He utilizes various types of firearms to deal extremely high damage to his opponents.

The Blademaster is a agile melee DPS that can shift into a defensive stats to off tank enemies.

The Spirit Shaper is the main healer in the game. It also features various summon abilities and a shape shifting skill.

Gameplay

I want to remember that this is only a first Impression, the CBT1 runs until the 8th of November and I will certainly find out a lot more about the game until then but this I what I can tell so far:

First of I have to say that I have done no PvP until now. This is something planned for my next play session but I have done various types of PvE content including solo trials and group dungeons.

The solo trials are arena based minigames. There are fighting type events but there are also events where you just dodging bosses. There are also some kind of bull hell trials where you have to dodge countless energy balls flying at you. Some of the fights are supposed to be won by luring your enemy into traps. Overall the trials were a lot of fun and they were well made.

While I did quite a few solo dungeon which are basically scaled down so you can AFK them I later tried one of the higher dungeons with a group of players. The result was… 3 of our 5 man group weren’t able to join because they did the dungeon by mistake earlier (currently there are certain limitation on the content). So I was fighting together with the one that could actually join. We were able to take down the first of four bosses in some kind of wave spawning dungeon thanks to us kiting around.
So far the fight was fun and I am really looking forward to doing my first dungeon with a full group of players.

Thanks to the language barrier I wasn’t able to do most of the other content, Revelation has to offer… I hope that will change over this CBT or with the next.

Next I want to mention the main quest. With all the Chinese in text and word I have not much of a clue what is actually going on. You run from NPC to NPC spamming your F key and your space bar. Suddenly you are teleported and phased to a completely different area of the game just to F spam again before being teleported again. The whole story adds countless of cutscenes of which most can be skipped. But if you watch them you earn yourself a bonus currency… so GG there.

From what I have seen in the cutscene the story might not be that bad but I don’t really understand what is the role of the NPCs are running with me. First I was fighting with and against some fish people just to help some bears fighting against angel like humans. Suddenly I was fighting against a zombie to just stand in the middle of some strange rituals followed by fighting some kind of ghostly dragon…

If you are just WTF right now, I feel the same!

Another really cool feature of Revelation Online is that fact that you can fly everywhere without limitations. The whole world can be traveled by flying around allowing you to explore every part of the world, which actually sometimes feels quite empty. There are waste areas with extremely low or no monster density at all.

In terms of character creation there are lots of different options to choose from but I personally had some hard time to make the character looks western. At least on the females I succeeded but I am still trying to get a western style male character.

tl;dr

Revelation Online has potential, there are various extremely good features about the game and the combat system is one of the best currently available but for a western release there are so many things that need to be done, that for now you should wait instead of trying the game. That way you will be much more motivated to play it once it is in a playable state!

And for the end of this first impression the end screen of a dungeon!

If you decide otherwise feel free to add me on the EU Beta Server to go for some test! Good Hunt!