Finally we have got a chance to log into the pre-closed beta server for Dragon Oath. As we have mentioned in our last articles, Dragon Oath is one of the most popular MMORPGs in the Chinese market now. How is it going for the English version?

The client is really small, about 600M roughly. After several patches, we finally logged into the game – to our surprise, the manual patch can’t update our game to latest version – that is really unpleasant.

As you can see from the above log-in interface, sohu.com remains its Chinese logo with pinying. Don’t they need an English name? After that, you are directly to the 2nd log in interface.

As you can see from the above, the integrated bulletin tells the players which event is being held today with time, event name and related information. This function is really great and players do not need to visit the game website to retrieve the latest event news.

Here we come to the server list. As we can see from the above, there is only one server for pre-alpha testing and is called Death Valley – sounds cool or dull? Lol…You can also see the network status right here. We do believe the translation here is a bit confusing and we will leave this part alone for them to fix. Let’s get into the character creation interface.

The default character is a she. She is a very traditional Chinese girl. You can name her, or change her to a him by clicking the Male button, choose her facial form from “the beautiful” to “the tender”, you can also dress her and find the best portrait for her. We do believe the customerization is good but we dislike the avatar icons. They should input some American facials there. If you are creating a male character, you can find a rainbow behind him. That’s a bit gay to us.

When you’ve logged into the game, you are in a deserted place that you don’t know. No novice guide, no hints. Since it’s pre-closed beta, we can bear it. We saw an old man riding a big bird and we do belive he is important. If you look carefully at the screenshot above, you will see there is a security period after each log in. That’s cool but sometimes it’s annoying – especially when you are doing trades – you have to wait till the period is gone!

The short cut is really hard to remember. Alt-A for bag?…Maybe the chinese use “A” letter for their bagpack instead of using “B”.

The texture here is really colorful. Sometime it’s too colorful that we can’t read the text! Auto-path function is really good. But if the NPC is not in the same scene, you have to manually find it’s area map (for god’s sake, it’s Tab key, not M key…). After you reach that map, you can then continue to use auto-path function. Bad and uncomfortable.

By following the quests, it’s really easy to reach level 10. But since it’s pre-closed beta, we have found tons of language mistakes and inconsistancies in quests and dialogues, sometimes you still find Chinese languages that untranslated. We do believe they will fix them before the closed beta launch.

Compared with other Chinese cultural themed mmorpg, such as Phoenix Dynasty Online (we have also introduced this game a lot), Dragon Oath is more fictional. History is only a background while in Phoenix Dynasty Online, you can find real historical figures everywhere, as well as their thoughts such as taoism, Confucianism, yinyang, wuxing etc.

Let’s see what happens when Dragon Oath goes to commercial launch.

Tian Long Ba bu, known as Demi-Gods, Semi-Devils, is a very famous kung fu fiction written by Jin Yong. We have introduced some of this same name game in the last year. Since the game is officially released for a long time and it’s very popular in China, we would like to run thorugh the details of this game and present this extremely good MMORPG to our readers.

Game Engine

The game is made from a very famous open source 3D engine: OGRE. “OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++ designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to produce applications utilizing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. The class library abstracts all the details of using the underlying system libraries like Direct3D and OpenGL and provides an interface based on world objects and other intuitive classes.” You will find that the game client is very small, only around 600M yet packed with a tonne of content. You can easily change your avatar in-game and dye your hair and clothes. But the developers made the game views to 2.5D so that the game will never make players dizzy.

Computer Specifications

Since it’s a 3D game, but we think most of your PC’s can handle this game. The following are the detailed specifications (not from the official website, but from our game reviewers. Oh yes, you need to install DirectX 9.0c to run the game.

Characters

You can create up to 3 characters in one account. You can choose to become a male or a female like in most other games. But if you want to delete your characters, you need to find the NPC in game and it will take 3 days to delete your character. Personally I think this is a good protection for those players whose accounts get stolen.

Interface

We hope the following information will be helpful to you if you want to try a game in a different language.

Bar Introduction

1.Character 2.Skills 3.Pets 4.Quest 5.Trade 6.Language Input 7.HotKey 8.ChatBox 9.Exp. Bar 10.Chat Setting 11.HotKey Sheet 12.Inventory 13.Friend 14.Team 15.Guild 16.System

Character Sheet Introduction

1.Character Name 2.HP 3.MP 4.Stigma/Vit. 5.Character Level 6.Avatar

Map Introduction

1.Lunar Time 2.Map Name 3.Help 4.Min Map Window 5.Coordinates 6.North 7.PK Mode 8. Facing Direction 9.Auto Path 10.World Map 11.Area Map 12.Help 13.Guide

Factions

If you have read the famous fiction: Demi-Gods, Semi-Devils, you will know that there are in total 9 factions in the book. Therefore, there are 9 factions in the game as well. I think most of you know about Shaolin Kung Fu. Shaolin is a faction in this game. For more details, you can search wikipedia about the factions of Kung Fu in ancient China. In this game, different factions will grant you different basic attributes of a character. For example, if you joined Shaolin faction, you distribute your points to HP or Attack will grant you more power than those in Xingxiu faction, according to the official introduction(We haven’t practised this yet since we only had a limited amount of time). But it is definately interesting when different people from different factions PK.

If you joined a faction, you can learn faction skills and do faction quests as well.

That’s enough information overload for today. We will bring you some other details in the next posts. If you are interested, please do reply and tell us what you want to know about this game. We would happily help you out.