Dragonsword: Awakening (Dragons Nest Devs)

Zindan

Zindan

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
8,217
7,057
This released a few days ago without much fanfare or marketing at all. It was made by former Dragons Nest developers, if you recall that game you'll notice similarities straight away. I believe it was meant to be a gacha game during its early development, but changed to a single player RPG with Co Op Bosses / Raids. I would say it is a mix of Dragons Nest (Character designs) and Genshin Impact (world / systems), but with no gacha or energy limits. Costs $30 and they are selling some outfits for $4 each. You get characters by progressing the main Story, and by getting Tickets via quest rewards that can be used to acquire a non-quest reward character from a list of about 15. If you play, get the nuker named Kalien.

Combat is pretty standard for such a game (gacha roots), 3 character teams that can do combos with each other, but no healing character as of yet. I've put about 10hrs into the game so far, and its been fun, world exploration and shiny hunting is good enough for me. Worth playing at whatever price sounds good.

 
Vorph

Vorph

Silver Baronet of the Realm
12,200
5,944
Yeah, it was a gacha initially but Webzen didn't pay them so they took the game back and sued, then released it themselves with the gacha trash removed.

Biggest problems from what I've heard are that since it was intended to be a live service gacha game, it's not even close to finished and the story just ends abruptly with no resolution, and on top of that the Korean->English translation was done with AI and is pretty bad. Because of the lawsuit and financial stuff going on there's a chance it will never get finished. It does appear that they will be winning the lawsuit based on how it's gone so far, but I would assume further development still hinges on how well it sells on Steam. Also, it still has all the different currencies that typical gacha games have to encourage spending, so it can be pretty grindy if you try to max out a bunch of characters.

If you can overlook that stuff, the gameplay is pretty fun if you want to play a game like Genshin Impact without all the predatory gambling bullshit.
 
Pyros

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,672
2,643
Yeah I played the demo and it plays exactly like a gacha, if you're not familiar with them a lot of it will be super confusing like how your xp is mostly obtained from using xp manuals rather than grinding past the first ~10levels, how you have to unlock your level cap 10 by 10 by farming special dungeons for the materials, then other dungeons for your skill materials and so on. It even has a built in battlepass for free and stuff like that.

Main issue I've seen other than it not being a finished product is that it's also balanced like a gacha, so it's just extremely easy, provided you gear and level your team appropriately. Also former standard/low rarity characters are just way weaker than former limited banner characters, which hopefully they'll fix since there's no gacha anymore so it's just fucked up balance.

Personally I put it on my wishlist but I'll be waiting 6months-1year to see what they add and wait for a potential sale before I touch it. Realistically even F2P playing an actual gacha open world would just be a better use of your time if you want this type of game just because most existing ones have had years of content added. Genshin (which this is basically a clone of) or Wuthering Waves have tons more content and story, and even just counting free characters aren't that far off.
 
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