Tarisland - HEAVILY INFLUENCED BY WOW, But... Is It Actually Good?
Taris Land is an interesting upcoming MMORPG that I had the pleasure of playing during it's global closed beta. The Game is apparently the World of Warcraft replacer over in China and is now being released for the Global audience.
The game has an ever present story, with plenty of cutscenes and voice acted dialogue, though I'd advise you to read the subtitles if you are interested in knowing what's going on, because the voice audio recordings tend to get cut off before a sentence is completed, and I think at one time there was a completely different voice recording playing for one line.
The story seems interesting and I was invested enough to not skip majority of the games cutscenes. Though your opinion on the story and cutscene may vary. Gameplay wise the first thing I noticed was the character creator. The game is race and gender locked. You can only be a male human paladin for example, and yet one of the main NPC's you meet is a female paladin...
I can't stand gender or race locks for your class. Give us the option to choose. If you're really trying to compete against games like WoW that has the racial and gender freedom to choose, and that game is almost 20 years old, at least give the player the freedom for race and gender for their class in your game that is very much a heavily influenced version of WoW.
The combat gameplay of this game plays a bit like a combination of action targeting and WoW gameplay. If you've played WoW there will be a lot of similarities with the gameplay, but the biggest difference is that in this game, you only have 6 attack buttons to press. The other 6 buttons use the letters Q to Z in order to cast them .
The combat is relatively fast paced for me as I played a hunter class, so I was able to move around the map while attacking, well until I tried out the other class specialization and was a more stationary ranged unit. There are dungeons and raids as well in the game, and the dungeons will mix you with actual players and bots, in order to speed up the dungeon queuing process. Is that a good thing though? To have bots? I mean it does speed up the process, but I had one dungeon where the bot tank was running around like a headless chicken and couldn't hold the aggro.
You have to be very patient with the bots as they take time to do their job. There is a skill tree and skill specialization to unlock, though the skills are limited, the spec tree is pretty varied, and you are free to build your class however you feel like it, within that class spec. The visuals of the game were actually really good. I loved the cartoony but high definition aesthetic, I rarely saw a blurry texture map, and the characters all looked very detailed in both the polygon count and the texture mapping, while still maintaining the cartoon style. Even when it rained the wet surfaces looked amazing.
The only thing that I was not impressed with in terms of visuals was the fact that from what I experienced it seems like your armor designs do not change when upgrading your gear. I fear that the game is relying on the cash shop skins for variety in character customization. Which is a disappointment. I always love being able to see my gear progression when I get new gear from dungeons. And I don't want to be forced to have to look good only from the cash shop. I hope that changes in the full version, but I'm not holding my breath for that. The audio is fine for the most part, the sound and combat effects for the most part are fine and sound like they belong.
The only issue is that the voices cut off sometimes during conversations. Which is a shame because the voice acting as a whole is actually very good. I didn't have any issues and didn't hate the voice acting at all. The game just needs to fix the voice over cut offs near the end of a sentence during a cut scene and it will be all better. Overall I'd say that Tarisland is a pretty okay game, there is some things I really like about it, like the minimal amount of buttons to press for combat, and the gorgeous visuals of the game.
I really love the art style and graphics. I'm concerned though that since this game is so similar to WoW, the global audience will be really looking at this game for all the things wrong with it. I know I found a fair amount of things that I wasn't impressed with, especially the gender and race locking during the character creation. For some people, including myself, that's a big deal breaker. Other than that I think for the free to play player, they may be very excited to play this. If they don't want to pay for WoW's subscription they can play this heavily influenced version for free.
The game is also going to be available on both PC and Mobile devices, so that's quite interesting. Oh, and before I forget, there is no auto pathing and no auto combat in this game, so that's a big plus for a MMORPG that is on both mobile and PC. So I have to give it props there. Tarisland is currently available to try out now in beta access, so if you are curious and want to give it a go before the release, now is the time.
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