First Impressions: SWORDS OF LEGENDS ONLINE Offers Some New Takes on MMOs and Has Potential
Wangyuan Shengtang and Aurogon are working with Gameforge to bring the MMORPG Swords of Legends Online to Western audiences. Gameforge was kind enough to allow me to participate in a recent Alpha Preview for the game and I wanted to share my thoughts. SOLO is slated to launch later this year on PC. Will you be playing?
Let’s start with character creation. Overall, I liked it. Everything was simple to use and there were plenty of options. I was also able to move my character around and even change their outfit as I customized to see how different pieces looked together. There weren’t any big problems with creating my character other than a lack of bright hair colors being available (blue always looked very close to black for instance) and it appeared that not all items had been localized yet. This was a thing I saw throughout my experience. This is an alpha, so there’s still plenty of work happening, but during the Alpha event, there were a lot of times where there were words I’ve never seen before being used and I think the localization team just needs to continue working on that before launch.
Next, let’s talk about graphics. SOLO released in China 2 years ago and it still looks pretty good. There are a few textures, mostly things like grass, that felt a little low-quality, but overall, I liked the look of the game. The characters in particular looked great. I have no qualms about the graphics. Likewise, the sound for SOLO is really good. I hope that they’re working on recording English voices as walking around and having NPCs speaking Chinese was not helpful at all. The music and sounds were great though and the voice acting was good from what I could tell.
As far as gameplay is concerned, I enjoyed SOLO. It’s not just a clone of a popular MMO. There aren’t a million quickbars and skills that you have to know. If you put the game down, you won’t have to take an hour just reading through your skills again. I appreciate this. Something that I found interesting was that you can toggle the controls to be the standard right-click to move the camera and Q and E to do skills, or you can have the mouse movement tied to the camera and the mouse buttons serve as Q and E. I think this is cool and I think both have their merits, but it is very much personal preference. I played a Reaper and everything was simple enough to jump in and play although the main tutorial does feel like a bit of a drag if you’ve ever played an MMO before.
One thing that was a little annoying is how they take forever to even talk about gear and even then, it felt very glossed over. Speaking of gear, you can buy costumes and skins using special currency and then you equip them on the same page as the store. This was very weird to me and I’m still not 100% sure that I understand it since it appeared I could even equip skins I hadn’t bought yet or something. Maybe I just didn’t get far enough in for this to be explained to me.
Overall, if you’re into MMOs, SOLO presents a different way of playing albeit with the same fetch quests and the like that all MMOs have. The story itself is okay from what little I got to experience of it and the characters look great. It still has some kinks to iron out, but this was just an alpha preview. I think SOLO definitely has potential.
