Risk Your Life : Path of the Emperor
Closed Beta First Impressions
After playing RYL: Path of the Emperor for a short while I was left with the same thoughts that I'd had after leaving the first NA RYL beta. It's still basically kill things over and over again until you lvl up from what I saw. Granted I only played for a couple hours, but that's why I'm calling these my "first impressions".Graphics
The first noticable difference is the water, you spawn on a dock and you notice that the water has been completely changed. It now reflects some scenery, light,etc. Like you see in many other games. Unlike the original where the water is...well it may as well be green grass with really flat textures. So the water is a step up in the way the game looks. However, this is about the only change I noticed graphically. I thought I saw a little bit better "poof" in the explosion of the Magic Missle skill and some others, so the skill effects seem to be improved as well.
A few other changes that I'd noticed were that armor had different stats in a sense. When you pick up the item it has a "D+" next to it or something of the sort to represent a higher defense. The other major change I encountered was that it took me about 5 minutes to get to lvl 10. This is a huge change when compared to the 45+ minutes it took to get to lvl 10 in the original. So from the looks of it, you lvl up MUCH quicker. This is both a good, and a bad thing IMO. For example, armor I noticed when looking in a random store, has a much higher dex/con requirement than in the original game. For example I saw some vests that normally go for about 110+ dex, with 160+ dex if I remember correctly. Now if you do level faster I suppose this is a good thing, and I'm assuming that the vests have higher stats than their previous versions.
While playing the game for the few hours that I did I kept thinking one major thing..."This is the first game all over again." Now, I played the first NA beta for roughly four months straight and managed to lvl up several characters in that time, but I never managed to get a high lvl character. (As in lvl 70+). This is problably because my favorite class for PvP was the archer class. The only problem is that they still sucked at PvM (player vs monster). They were absolutely horrible in a party, the only purpose of the archer was to pull. Their melee damage was weaker than that of the warrior/assassin, and they had no AoE spells or positive enchantments for their party. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find a party to save my life. I ended up getting to 52+, and then I quit because of the inbalance and the fact that I had NO hope of catching up to people who playing the game 24/7 and were in their 80's. The faster lvling in Path of the Emperor may help to solve this problem, however if one's level decreases value wise because of this I'm not entirely sure how that will all work out. These sorts of inbalances, however, as a whole haven't been fixed from what I saw (And I'll wait for the other reviewsers to confirm this). The archer gets the cold shoulder once again, but this time around they can't even use str weapons and lvl str in hopes of becoming a damage dealer. The skills/weapons for this are limited even moreso than before thus taking out an entire build for one of the classes. I hope that part was a dream, because it was hard enough already.
I'll overlook those sorts of things right now though because as previously mentioned I didn't play it extensively enough to make a large detailed review of it all.
Well anyway the world is what really caught my attention. The world in which you first spawn is completely different from any of the islands/continents in the first game. There are many more areas to explore, more enemies to fight, the land as a whole is simply much more interesting. Sure the graphics haven't improved when it comes to the landscape really but they weren't horrible to begin with. And they really did have some creative places to go. The first thing I did was get to lvl 10, and then explore the island as much as I could. I won't put down what's all there because I think the most fun I got out of the game other than really playing it was walking around jumping on top of stuff.
Verdict:
As a whole, I'd say that RYL: Path of the Emperor is basically the original, with some differences here and there, and they'll either take a long time to get used to or you'll find them so small that it'll seem just like the first one. The impression I got was just like the first game, hit things, lvl, do a few quests here and there, walk around some more. Since demons and humans are lvling together in this game, as in on the same island and everything as friends, I can't see where the PvP will come in, but hopefully it'll be something pretty fun that doesn't require you to play for 3 months 24 hours a day so you can compete in it. I'll leave it to the other reviewers to fill us in on these sorts of things though.
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