Black Gold Online Review

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Black Gold Online Review

#1 Post by Administrator » Mon Jun 23, 2014 3:48 pm

Black Gold Online recently entered Open Beta a few days ago. I figured I'd give it a try and see if it was any good or not. The screenshots weren't super impressive or anything, but most MMORPGs aren't. However, it had some potentially interesting features.

Black Gold free loot codes

Character Creation
While BG doesn't give you a ton of customization options, it gives enough. There's currently 4 races (with more on the way) 2 (race-locked)factions, lots of varied classes, ~10 different face/hair presets, you can modify the width/length of various parts of your face and body, change eye color and texture, all that good stuff. There's only one instance of gender-locking: Oracle is female-only. The armors can vastly change how your character looks and you can wear vanity items over your armor to make yourself unique. Overall, I would say it is better than most MMOs, yet not the best.

8/10. That's all that needs to be said.
irrlicht.png

Classes and Skills
As I said before, there's lots of classes. Sure, there's some overlap. I mean, there's like 3 or 4 classes that can summon. There's 2 healers. Lots of variations of mages. Add in a few melee, a tank and a gunner for good measure. It's hard to find a class you don't find at least somewhat interesting. The skills are quite varied and you will find yourself switching them out often as you need to adapt to different situations. The good thing is that none of the classes seem really lame and ineffective. I, a mancer of geos, am quite proficient and AoEing down large groups of enemies, throwing down some crowd control, or mass healing and buffing my teammates. Or even summoning all the things, because, why not?

The skill system is a bit awkward and takes some getting used to. Once you get the hang of it, it's actually pretty nice. You'll first notice that you only have one skill hotbar and a limited number of slots for skills. Not only that, but you are limited by what types of skills can be slotted into different places. Now, before you complain, "But that sucks! I want ALL the skills!" there's a few things you should know.

There's 3 different types of skills (plus normal attack skill, passives, racial, and class base skills): primary, secondary, and elite. You can have 3 primary, 2 secondary, and 1 elite skill equipped on a hotbar at a time. You may also use a primary skill in a secondary slot, but not a secondary skill in a primary slot. OK, that sounded confusing, it boils down to this: a higher rank skill cannot be put into a lower rank slot!

Now, there's one more feature that you'll want to know about: you can have up to 3 hotbars set. But, before you go about throwing skills on them and switching between them mid-combat, be warned that can be quite disastrous! See, while you can switch them (or even open the skill menu and replace a single skill) mid-combat, any skill that is newly accessible will go on a 30 second cooldown; others will be available almost instantly. This is fine if, say, you are fighting a boss and want to switch out a few skills, but if you're completely changing everything you could be making yourself completely useless for quite some time. Might as well twiddle your thumbs while your teammates do all that "work" stuff.

This all sounds quite damning, but it actually feels rather balanced. When I go to Trial of the Brave (more on that later), I often switch out my skills or change hotbars while fighting a boss solo. It's all about being careful and timing it correctly.

As the skills are all very different in functionality and you'll be swapping them around often, I'd give it good marks. However, the overall total number of skills available to each class is still a bit low. I enjoy the skill system and each skill does feel like it carries some weight, so I'll give it a 7/10.
bg.skills.png

Combat
This largely has been covered above, so I'll keep it short. Combat feels fine; it plays much like you would expect from WoW. There's one odd thing out from other MMORPGs, though, and that's that you can also ride mechs or war beasts. No, I don't mean mounts; you actually use these to fight. You can call out your biped mech with rocket launchers and go to town on random monsters to power through quests (or enemy faction!) should you choose to. Thing is, they are blatantly OP and you'll have almost no trouble taking out most enemies this way. As much as I like to abuse something that's OP, it kind of takes the fun out of it for me.

Most normal monsters don't have any crazy skills you need to worry about, but some do. Most of the stuff you should worry about comes from adventures and dungeons (more on those later). For example, in Trial of the Brave, you'll encounter some dryads that are super annoying. The knockbacks, knockdowns, stuns, and entangles can be real killers. I assume there will be more difficult enemies in the game later, as it sure is starting to ramp up in difficulty.

Oh, on the topic of difficulty, the early game is very easy and, honestly, a tad boring. If you die, you probably walked away from your computer to get a drink. Normal monsters pose almost no threat; at least if you take them on in managable quantities. At level 16, my partner and I were AoEing groups of 5 level 23 monsters. You know, for glory, because we sure didn't have any quests to do that. Even bosses can be fairly easy so long as you are paying attention. Every once in awhile, though, you'll get slaughtered, so it's all in good fun. I'll need more time to get a feel for how the late-game is, but for now I'll give it a 7/10.


Controls & Input
Now this is where things go bad. The game really starts to show its beta quality here. There's 3 different control modes: "Standard" (WoW-like), Black Gold mode (some weird control scheme that I didn't care much for, and is hard to describe), or Crosshair mode (more of a 3rd person, over-the-shoulder camera mode where the crosshair dictates where you are aiming your skills). It's a great quality of a game to have such a varied choice of control types like this, so I'll give them that. However, the Black Gold mode is just awkward, and crosshair mode would be nice but is a bit buggy right now. Almost every action is bindable and can be changed, but a few things are missing. For example, when riding in your mech/beast, the left-control button seems to toggle viewpoint without any way to reconfigure it. Another issue is that sometimes you have to press Escape a few times to get it to actually close a UI window or clear target. These are all things that can be fixed so I won't be too harsh, but they are serious issues. Still, even with the awkwardness of it, the game is very playable. 6/10.


Graphics
Not much to say here. Either you like it or you don't. As a picture is worth 1,000 words, check out the screenshots and see what you think. I think it looks "fine." Remember, MMOs typically aren't going to have great graphics specifically because of the dynamic interactions with players makes it very difficult balance polygon counts and effects vs. performance across all users. I'll give it another 7/10.
bg.town.png

Story & Theme
TL;DR
?/10


Dungeons, Adventures, PVP
This is a big strength of the game. Although the dungeons and adventures that I've seen so far aren't incredibly long or complex, they are quite varied. They aren't all just "walk around and kill stuff, then fight a boss." There's lots of different modes. Dungeons you're familiar with, but an adventure is almost like a mini-quest for other game modes. For example, Trial of the Brave, the first adventure, is a mode where you are locked in an arena and must fight 5 waves of enemies, then a boss, and then move onto the next round. You just try to hold out as long as you can and are rewarded for your progress. In another adventure, you are teleported into enemy territory and must disguise yourself to steal intel from NPCs. The trick is that other players will be out to hunt you. There's another adventure where you fight against another player's shadow (NPC-controlled copy of their character) and the actual player has the ability to come in and defend his shadow.

I think the variety of modes like this are a really great feature. I particularly enjoy Trial of the Brave and suggest you give it a shot. You'll be wanting the loot, trust me.

PVP also has many modes. There's raw overworld PVP, battlegrounds where your faction fights for supremacy, arenas, and PVP-based adventures. The PVP arenas also have some nice modes. In one, your team is given a bomb, and several fake bombs, that you need to escort into the enemy base. The fake bombs can be used for distractions. Once a bomb is laid in the enemy base, you must try to defend it while they try to defuse it. It's really quite fun, though from my limited experience, people tend to leave mid-match quite often.

It might be noted that if your computer is underpowered, you might want to avoid the all-out war. With so many people in mechs and helicopters and riding beasts, explosions everywhere, things get a bit crazy. You can probably expect low framerates.

I'll give this an 8/10 if only because I don't know how great the end-game dungeons will be. I hope they are long, complex, and require more strategy than just rushing in unprepared. Difficulty is a good thing.
bg.dungeons.adventures.png

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botje
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Re: Black Gold Online Review

#2 Post by botje » Tue Jun 24, 2014 12:06 pm

hmm.. looks nice, ill go check it out :)

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BlubBlab
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Re: Black Gold Online Review

#3 Post by BlubBlab » Mon Jun 30, 2014 4:55 am

I tested it until level 19.

First the positive things
1.) char creation is very nice,
2.) the game world seems huge,
3.) loot of achievements and login bonuses,
4.)auto path finding works seems to work everywhere unlike rom.
5.)In pvp arena your chars got pvp gear so that you are the same.
6.)World war pvp with 2 fractions.

What I don't like is the game send you clueless through the the game world very much like Rom or DP.
Especially the skill system is like ROM , I mean it is unlike in NW you don't know how much dmg your skill make and it has the same weird calculation that show up in the description. In the end I have no clue what my best skills are and which skill I should follow to use until I go into the board for the maths and make me a big excel/oo sheets

The game has a loot of mismatching part like evasion with stamina while the game isn't a real action mmorpg, mecha + aircrafts + motorcycle + magic is a nice idea but there is more to the not all things seems fit together.

The bonuses and encounter system reminds my of the game " Zombies ate my Pizza" shot video ->https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIz48CKXPnk

I would say for guys which looking for the same feeling like in rom it is a good game. It's definitely addressing on hardcore gamers for guys like me which are annoyed by stuff like this It definitely isn't something to play very long.

While I was playing I got until now 20 in-game mails from goldseller and the game I would say is alpha not beta .
Jack-of-all-trades, but master-of-only of a few :D

My Reps:
https://github.com/BlubBlab/Micromacro-with-OpenCV (My version of MM2 with OpenCV and for MS Visual Studio)
https://github.com/BlubBlab/rom-bot (rombot with no stop WP and advanced human emulation mode and some other extensions)
https://github.com/BlubBlab/Micromacro-2-Bot-Framework ( A work in progress )
My Tools : viewtopic.php?f=10&t=6226

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