We recently got the chance to play test Black Gold Online, the newest MMORPG from Snail Games USA, the developers that brought us recently Age of Wushu. Black Gold Online is a steampunk fantasy based MMO that takes place during an epic struggle between two major factions: the technologically driven Kingdom of Isenhorst and the nature loving magical Erlandir Union. The game has not yet hit the full release but will be completely free to play once it goes live.
We started our test doing a quick sweep over the character creation, currently there is two races available for each faction with a third race available for both in the future, for our play test we turned to the Dwarves of Isenhorst, classic builders and inventors that had invented most of the steam driven technology that exists in the kingdom today. We were able to play either a male or female, though in all honesty the female Dwarf didn’t look particularly dwarven to us and seemed a little more pixie if anything. There is a full range of sliders and other customisation options to create a more unique looking character, depending on the race that you decide to choose.
We had a wide selection of classes to choose from and interestingly some of the classes are gender locked, such as the Occultist who can only be played as by female characters. We chose Spectromancer as our class and when we hit next it decided it was going to make us be a female character, which seemed to be the default, and by hitting back to see if we’d missed the gender selection we were inadvertently set back to playing as being the Punisher class. Life.
Stepping into the game for the first time we were greeted with a large cinematic revolving around an invasion on an island from the Erlandir, taking us into the action, which was essentially a tutorial area where as we progressed across the island fighting off a few enemies we would hit waypoints that would trigger a new cut scene is story progressed. Interestingly we got the chance to jump into one of the Carrier vehicles, the armored mech tanks that players can acquire and fight with in PVP battle sounds. The tutorial mode carried on until we were put face-to-face with a huge Magma boss, that barely took any damage as we unloaded on them and was obviously part of the scripted element and we were not meant to beat him.
Stepping into the main portion of the game it was readily apparent that this was a Chinese MMORPG, Snail Games USA being the American division of Snail Game (China), with a number of clickable icons to claim rewards for levelling up, logging in, staying in game, participating in events, etc. which is seen much more in the isometric top down point and click hero building type MMORPGs. Added to this was that each time we levelled up, acquiring item of piece of gear we suddenly increased our “Might” level, which in other Chinese MMORPGs are typically seen as being Battle Rating or something along those lines.
Still, the game was obviously much more traditionally MMORPG focused, with quests, combat, graphics and gameplay everything else was fairly stable to the genre and this hybrid of the point and click hero build MMORPGs was probably the most original feature about the game.
We managed to fight a few different mobs in the starter zone, completing quests and being sent on to a new location, which led us to an instanced based dungeon to recover a wizards treasure and then on even further until we reached the main Dwarven city, which had a real Ironforge (World of Warcraft Dwarven capital) vibe about it. One thing we did like was that early on around level 5 we were given access to our own mount; a steampunk style motorbike!
Questing was particularly story driven, sending from NPC to NPC to find out new bits of exposition with the war that was raging on and the conflicts that the Dwarves were facing at home, unfortunately the action and combat took a dramatic dip after the initial tutorial area and any combat that we did have was over in a matter of second with barely a scratch on those sort no challenge to it at all.
We checked through the various features of the game, examined the different submenus and noticed that at level 10 we will acquire access to a Carrier of our own, playing through to level 10 we were disappointed that it wasn’t something that was instantly accessible and was no doubt unlocked through a quest.
Definitely worth a try. Coming, a video fighting a boss with a level 40 character. And if you want to know more about this title, click on the "info" button below.
