Elyon is an open-world action combat MMORPGs sent in the continent of Harth, where the two sovereign realms, Vulpin and Ontari, are out of the war for the control of a portal that leads to Paradise.
A very nice narrative for an MMORPG. I did not have the pleasure of playing the closed beta 1 but we did play closed beta 2 which recently closed. I wish I could have played closed beta 1 so I could see the progress that they made all the way to closed beta 2. However it’s not a bad thing because we played a much more full game including the new class Slayer.
Elyon is not one of those free to play games when it is released on the 29th of September and it comes with a price tag of 29.99 euros on Steam. You will be able to buy extra download packages which will give you some benefits in the game. Some of the benefits from the downloadable expansion packs will include rubies, which you can use the in-game Ruby shop for inventory expansion slots, inventory space expansion, character expansion ticket, item drop rate increase, daily rewards, auto recharge timers and XP boosters. In the game shop you will also be able to find a lot of cosmetics such as glasses, bunny suits and items that you can use for crafting which are also available through grinding in the game.
These are all the information we can find on Steam before even playing the game. So let’s go and have a look at the game and let’s start with character creation.
Character creation
In the character creation screen I was very happy because the options are enough. They were not overwhelming or missing and there was a nice option such as changing the color of the iris or changing the color of the white of the eyes. You can pick from four races which include human, elf, Orc and Ein. Personally after seeing that there are humans, elves and Orcs I would expect a dwarf but okay, Ein will do.
Classes
After you create your character and you are ready to go, of course, you have to pick a class. This game features four different classes:
Warlord, which is a sword and board tank.
Slayer, which is a two-handed DPS class.
Mystic, which is the healing class.
Elementalist, which is the spell-casting magical class.
Gunner, a long-range DPS class.
All glasses can deal damage to different lengths and all classes can somewhat heal through portions and some of them through some specific skills but nowhere near as mad as a Mystic.
PVE and Questing
The PVE part of the game is as usual very easy to understand. You go to an NPC to guide you through the tutorial on how to fight, how to use skills, how to use the menus, where to find everything. They really have looked into the tutorials to make the transition for a new player into the game very easy. The game really takes you by the hand and guides you into the world of Elyon.
The quests are easy to find with the auto movement option in the game. The quests are also very easy to do. The respawn time of the resources or the NPCs needed to kill is very low. I even found some of the resources were respawning every 3 seconds. One thing I did find is that when you try to auto-path to a quest there’s two things it might happen: one, the path is longer than if you were to go there on your own and number two is that sometimes you can get stuck on a tree that has no place in the auto path route. Other than those two I didn’t find anything else that I could report to you. In the PVE section there are also solo dungeons, party dungeons, public quests, World bosses.
Gear and Professions
When it comes to equipment it’s very easy to find. You get some from your quests, some from the dungeons. There is of course PVE gear and PVP gear. On the PVP aspect there is an arena with 1 V 1,2 V 2, 3 V 3 casual and ranked versions of those. There is an open world PVP that can happen anywhere between the Borderlines. The game also is made to have sieges with siege weapons and many more which we did not experience during closed beta, or at least i didn’t experience it during closed beta 2. The problem for me for the gear and anything else in the game is that it is acquired via a token system. This means that you have to grind a lot of different tokens in a lot of different areas.
There are no professions in the game in the classical sense. Everyone can make anything they want. The things you can do as far as crafting goes in the game is upgrading your Runestones. Enhance your gear. Upgrade your weapons and gear. Craft potions, craft housing items. There are a lot of things for you to craft in the game but there is no actual profession you can just go and do them.
In this system every item has a certain amount of tries you can have for example if you want to enhance a piece of equipment and it has four enhancement slots you have four tries to enhance it. If one of them fails and the other three are successful then your equipment level is + 3. If you want to retry and make it a +4 you have to buy a scroll which resets the enhancement and then you start all over again. In some other cases if you try to upgrade a weapon and it fails then the item itself has a chance of breaking, which means you have to go out there and grind a new weapon to try and upgrade it again.
Combat
The combat in the game is very fluent and easy to grasp and the mechanisms involved are also very nice. For example you have stamina for your dodging / invasion, you also have mana for some of your skills and some skills which instantly or in large amounts regenerate mana during combat. This mechanism forces you to use both of them, shoot a few shots with your mana powered abilities and then switch to the ones that regenerate mana in order to control your balance between the two, so you have a constant flow of skills to do. This involves skills which are bound to your left mouse button and in your right mouse button as well as your 1 2 3 4 Q E and R buttons. The only problem I found with combat is that the ranged classes, they just feel that they don’t really have any good range. Their long-range abilities are in a range that any melee player can use a charge or jump ability and close the gap instantly, making you feel like you don’t really play a range class. Having said that, this is where the dodge mechanism and abilities come into play.
I did find a little bit of a problem for my game style and my experience with crowd control where you in reality don’t have any immunities. And when I say in reality you don’t have any munities I mean that there are some immunities but they disappear really quickly and if you happen to fight two or three people you can find yourself permanently knocked down, permanently rooted or without the ability to use any of your skills. There are some skills that if timed well will allow you to avoid that CC. For example skills that make you fly in the air and attack will avoid roots, etc. In this combat system from what I could figure out playing the game and with some friends of mine if you really want to do well in PvP especially open-world you need to have a healer with you, a Mystic because some of their abilities give you crowd control communities and allow you to bypass those timers. It seems to me this game is trying to promote group gameplay, which is a plus in my book.
Skills
I’m writing here about the skills of this game as an extra part of this article for one and only reason. The reason is that there isn’t just one system for your skills. Personally being a person that plays mainly Western design MMORPGs I found it a little bit confusing. As you level up you will gain your skills in the normal way that you expected in MMORPG.
You also get some Buffs / skills which come from what type of runestone / gems you have put on to your gear. For example if you have more red runestones you get more DPS bonuses on to your gear if you have green you get a little bit more healing if you have yellow you get more skill points or utility abilities and so on and so forth.
On top of that you have the Luminus system which allows you to get more bonuses such as critical damage more heal more Shield or defensive bonuses and Buffs. Furthermore from those systems you also have an achievement system which you put items into to complete the achievement. You put items into it. For example you put a piece of gear you found in the achievement book and is kept in the achievement book and once you complete the set then you get some bonuses such as Hp or crit chance. One book is 20 hp more, five books is 100 HP more and you can buff your character up through the achievement system and the item acquisition.
Conclusions
Overall the game graphically is very nice and does it have a lot of bugs. I’m happy with the combat system, especially when the game is promoting group gameplay and requires you to have some of the other classes with you. This does not mean you cannot play solo or in smaller groups or that you cannot play without a healer. Costumes and vanity items you can find on the in-game shop to buy with real life money. Some of them which you can find in the game are typical Eastern game style and you will find pretty much all the things you expect to find, wings to fly around and glide, bunny suits, motorcycles and other items.
When it comes to the combat for the PVE, no problems there either, the dungeons are challenging after level 38 the first two are okay which is understandable since you’re still learning the game and you’re leveling up. The PVP combat is fast-paced but I have a feeling that the game will be severely based on gear and I didn’t really see a lot of matchmaking when it came to the arenas. I was level 35 and I was matched up against 42 and 44 and that made a big difference in the fight.
All the above make me feel that this game is very grindy and for those that are casual players I don’t know if this will be a good game for them. For those that have plenty of time and love grinding, that want to have things to grind, this game will provide you with hundreds of hours of things to do in a game from grinding solo dungeons, party dungeons, world bosses, crafting items, acquiring tokens from 6-7 different varieties, it will be a paradise for you.
My only worry about this game is the same worry I have about all the games that have a microtransaction shop. If the offers will stay on cosmetics and boosts only or not. This game does come with a price tag so the shop shouldn’t have this problem. However as a person I have never trusted the companies to play fair when it comes to money. So after playing the game, I will exclude from my rating the shop and I will say this is a very good game and we’ll give it an 8/10 for the overall experience that I had over the five days i played it on the closed beta 2.