Hello everyone! For the last few tests of Conqueror’s Blade, I have been playing it and giving it a shot to see what upcoming MMO has to offer in terms of gameplay and PVP. Lucky for me after the current Beta started on the 7th of February. I got a chance to really look at how the game feels from a low-level perspective again up to around level 30. Before I get into any of the gameplay I am going to cover the glaring worries I have about this game from the get-go. First off this game is using the my.com platform. My.com has proven in the past that it only respects one thing and one thing only, money. Because of their lust for money, it eventually leads to pay to win or pay to progress type scenarios that can be seen with Revelations. The limited daily activity that you could pay to get more of and they did the same to Skyforge. All of these games I have played in beta and release and they have ended the same way each time. Gameplay for Conqueror’s Blade appears to be accommodating to this style of Pay To Win or Pay To Progress build. Real life time is needed for many aspects, as well as how they are limiting different parts of the game. This doesn’t make me feel good about the game off the start but I will make sure to cover the game fully for you to make the final call on your thoughts. I am but a herald, nothing more or less. As stated the game is still in beta and hasn’t seen a full release so I will be limited to comments on what is currently going on within the beta release. Personally, I’m not that happy but could see some very minor changes to make me give this game a positive nod. The current build of the Tutorial is quite good compared to earlier builds of the game. I felt it gave good direction on how to maneuver and play the game and explained the buttons adequately. It also allows the player to test some of the units and troops that will be available later in the game. Please note that the first skill you are taught, “Shield Charge” is not known by the basic units you are allotted at the start so it is wise to become acquainted with controlling your units. Such as C to get your units to follow you, V to let them openly attack, F1 and F2 for different formation types that you will need later on when you get more advanced units. The battlegrounds were back in this session. This time adding a 3 point control scenario into the mix while keeping the siege testing map and a PVE scenario to play. The daily quests that pop up at the NPC will reward you for participating in them yet they added something to these dailys that they didn’t have before: Tokens. Tokens can be used for gathering resources. From what I can tell right now dailies are the fastest way to earn much-needed Bronze coins at the start, as well as tokens, and exp needed to level. So make sure you don’t miss a day or you will be behind. Before I really started to Powerlevel the Quests: The battlegrounds have something I hope will be fixed when they go live or beforehand. The brackets are quite large for the levels. Allowing level 10s that are just learning the game to fight level 30s that have had time to prepare and learn what works. To give an example I watched a shield and sword player hold back four, then five, level 10 to 13 guys on a point without being killed for up to 4 mins with no supporting units. So I can safely say there is not any itemization when it comes to the battlegrounds and stronger players will continue to be strong as of right now. The ability to move around the World Map was in this time. It was offered in a very different style than I was used to when thinking of an MMO. Instead of controlling your Main and riding from place to place personally your troops and avatar were represented by a cluster of units. I had to point and click on a destination and allow them to drive themselves, though I could select if I wanted them to take a direct route. World map with resource nodes: While in the World Map you can see the different territories that people control, nodes or stations for gathering that you can walk to, other players, and bandits. I didn’t get too much into territory control as I didn’t join any Houses (guilds), so I can only comment on the other items mentioned. Bandits operate like roaming PVE scenarios that you can do yourself. When encountering them you enter into a field and slay them as you would any other NPC in any other MMO. Yet as stated you can see them on the map, dodge these encounters or engage them if you so feel like it. Currently, I do not remember what they dropped, or what good they did off hand. Yet it's there to add flavor to the game. Since I brought up the gathering nodes on the World Map I will try and cover the very convoluted and annoying crafting system in this game. To start out with why it isn’t the most fun thing in the world, it is extremely limited in many ways. Right now with the current setup, you need the tokens you get from the dailys and money. You only get five tokens per day according to what I found and other players answering me. You only get five tokens per day to collect at the nodes. As well from what I have seen per collect is 500 bronze coins. So you’re limited in two ways on this game. Now if you take into account what I said about my.com before. This here is a major foresight heavy sigh incoming. Not to mention every single step once you get the materials you need from the World Map requires money to perform. So to gather you need money and tokens, processing needs money, to craft the weapons or armor you need money, to finally make the unit you need money. Depending on the unit that you are trying to make this costs a ton of bronze, time, and effort to keep up with this part of the game. The only way to somewhat get around this is to earn money to go to another NPC in the game and spend it there to buy the items that you were crafting. Yet the price there is more than the price you pay to have the items crafted roughly by my calculations. (Convenience tax yay) Also, the quests for the game to train you on how to do all of this are locked at level 15. Yet, players were explaining this way before level 15 due to how important decent units are to PVP. Not to mention losing doesn’t net a decent amount of EXP like winning does, massively so. So I guess the current development team wants you to suffer defeat for a long time before you figure this all out. As you can see how hard it is to craft better units. I will give some insight into how a unit develops, and then how your general develops. Units take everything stated above to create. As with the crafting, there is a ton to how to upgrade and improve units. So I will attempt to break it down bit by bit. First off each of your units has its own individual level with its own individual tree that you can put levels into. So you can set one shield unit to have more of this and another shield unit to do more of that. On top of in your camp (that I so happened to stumble on early) you can click in and find there another set of trees that affect all the units of that type. This “research” takes real life time to train. In the current beta, it has no timer for this training yet most likely looking at how many skills there are and depending on how long it takes. This will need to be checked on and kept up with daily. Because a unit cannot be upgraded to a more powerful version (from what I have seen) until the player levels up it are important to maintain training them so the player can have the most powerful versions as soon as they level into them. Individual Unit upgrades Tree: Camp Tree for units: If that doesn’t get you excited there are trees upon trees of skills that you can train into. You have your commander to train as well! It is not as complicated as the units that you are in control of from what I have seen so far. There are currently six skills that you can choose from with two upgrades to each one. With two ultimates to choose from. You can train all of them, yet you can only take three skills into battle and one ultimate just like most mobas. (AKA a Loadout) As seen here: Now some changes have been made to the commanders since the siege build. We use to have access to every single type of weapon right from the get-go. Now some of the weapons you cannot get to until later levels. As well as you get a free skill book to learn one of the starting weapons at level 20. This seems dependant on how far it goes to allow you to make a commander and be able to use 3 or 4 different weapons. Giving you that little bit of extra customization down the road. Armor currently is just upgrades to what you are wearing. I haven’t seen much in the way of different armor sets doing different things for you besides the difference between light, medium, and heavy. When I posed the question in game, many people stated that the game would have different craftable sets for light, medium, and heavy. They just have not been implemented yet in the game. So right now it seems like another way to burn currency until we see this. Additionally, just like the units in the game, the armor can be crafted as well as bought currently. I attempted to craft it first, I could not find the items I needed to craft the armor anywhere but the smuggler. So I opted to just buy it off the NPC. The last bit of customization that you have for your commander is the use of skill points you can put into your stats. Right now the most important one to people that I was playing with was Leadership. Leadership gives you more points to have more units in your army. To explain the first; units you get are 40 points to slot. If you have five slots you would need 200 points to use them. Leadership is a 1 to 1 ratio for those points. The stronger the unit the more of these points they take out of the total pool of points you have. There is room to customize and room to play with many variations of the game when it comes to your commander and your units. For right now though that really is what the game is. Not saying there is anything wrong with that, just think of it as a MOBA with controllable units. That you can place, set up, and use in many forms of different tactics. Add in who can take over the world first with territory control and you have Conqueror’s Blade as it stands. A PVP group’s delight, a perfectionists dream, a stragaists greatest challenge. All bundled up in the most horrible wrapping paper you ever seen, that makes you scared to open it... DT
