Are you a hardcore Xianxia cultivation fan, or even rarer- an oldschool Wuxia reader? Great! Chances are that you’ve been fruitlessly searching for Chinese Triple A games of any genre to satisfy that Ancient Chinese niche so deprived to us Western laowais. Now here’s the real question: are you a filthy casual in the MMORPG genre? Are you the friendless moron who tried soloing the game while looking up guides that rapidly fall obsolete with each patch or update? Are you the noob that everyone in your guild ignores because they’re too busy queuing for the time-gated events? Did you assume that this would be Age of Wushu but with better graphics?
I’ve made all these mistakes myself while playing this game which released in 2019. As of 2022, the player count is small, but not pitifully so. You’re listening to a man who played the Nova Ragnarok for a good year and a half on his first gaming PC while the player count (which were mostly offline vendors) was 3000-something at its peak. Now, SOLO on steam shows only 1,000 players online at any given time. A good proportion of these players are Chinese players. I don’t mean Hong Kong or Taiwanese dogs, but actual Mainlanders who don’t need a VIP to play it. They play the game in english too, and almost every compatriot I met has understandably decent English, too.
A quick appraisal of the fatalistic label of SOLO as a “dead game”: All MMORPGs’ player bases inevitably shrink gradually from initial launch, as more and more of these players realize that the game may not be for them… or they inevitably realize in SOLO these same problems I’ve briefly listed above once they push beyond the initial honeymoon phase of under 48 hours of gameplay. With a themepark MMO centered around Ancient Chinese fantasy, a game this niche in the West was destined to have only around…10,000 players at most, and that’s being generous. The only reason I would argue in the game’s favor that it isn’t really “dying” is — as of this review — simply because judging from the same guilds and angry toxic individuals online, this game is seeing its loyal visitors daily and even weekly. These are the same WoW and Korean MMO veterans who are used to grinding ungodly hours per day and showing up like a trained dog to raid events. They may be enough to sustain the game for about…1, 2 years?
Yeah, the prognosis ain’t pretty.
In actuality, if you enter this world all alone, and intend to play a game acronymed as “SOLO” solo, you’re going to have a very lonely drab experience. Like the famous GDC talk where they discuss how a large amount of gamers really do enjoy playing MMOs alone, it’s shocking how a game acronymed as SOLO is so…not fun for solo MMORPG gamers! The game population is not high enough for the cities or the landscapes to have a genuine simulation of experiencing life beside a million other people packed densely per square li competing for the same treasure swords and artifacts. Other players don’t tend to talk back to you, which according to Josh Strife Hayes’ theory that MMOs are a “social facilitator” means that SOLO fails at the “matchmaker” role, kinda like most eastern MMOs, where the game was meant to be played in gaming cafes, so I guess that explains the mediocre chat interface. But if you don’t design the game so that you compel other players to chat in-game (read: a Western casual on a home PC), you won’t be really interacting much with other human beings in this game.
If you’re not interacting with other players, if you don’t have the assistance of friends or guildies to point out the poorly-labeled task prerequisites or obscure event interface for you, you’re going to be playing a very poorly-paced “story-driven” RPG with decent combat. Seriously, the original story SOLO is based off of is already a generic garbage 3D Chinese animated Xuan Yuan story. I’m told that the singleplayer games are better, but the stories in the quests of SOLO that are supposed to expand off of this already existing universe are so drab and lazily told, I’m quite annoyed to discover that the huge amount of GB (over 80!) required to download it was almost sheerly due to the recorded dialogue. I’m someone who actually cares about lore and story in an MMO, and after about ten hours of gameplay I gave up actually reading the dialogue exchange between the player and the npcs. Click click click! The vast majority of quests involve walking back and forth across maps, talking to NPCs that may or may not have decent Chinese voice-acting, horrid english voice acting, and absolutely stiff, lifeless animation that should not be the case for a game that was this hyped upon release.
The combat is the focus of SOLO. Your character’s attacks regardless of class are fast and dazzling, and PvE mobs have a slightly varied palette of ways to attack and engage the player back. I absolutely hated the Chanchun mobs, which were these ugly-cute Toad mobs that possess a charming lack of self-awareness as they mock the players for being ugly demons while talking in a depraved Donald duck-like voice, but whenever their HP gets reduced to 0, oh god…they do this skill called Chanchun martyr and it makes them invulnerable for a few seconds while they attempt to do a last second bumrush of kamikaze glory and it’s absolutely annoying at lower levels (even worse, I couldn’t tell why sometimes this skill activates sometimes and doesn’t, mostly 80% of the time).
Once you reach the max level turning the player into Student 1, that’s where endgame content begins. Your main combat skills, such as the Star Fragment of my Spellsword Blademaster class become stronger. It actually becomes satisfying to accumulate “Cold sky” on my enemies, then nuke them with my Z key where I hotkeyed “Illumination” and watch sword rays puncture into my enemies with an ice-y crunching sound per stack.
In addition, upon reaching Student 1, the game makes the curious decision of giving you leveled 75 gear, suddenly skyrocketing what were your measly lvl 40 gear into true DPS and power. I guess it’s a good way to give the player a sense that he’s gotten stronger, but if I didn’t have a fellow guildie to tell me that I could simply buy lvl 90 gear from this one chick at Cloudrise, I would have been terribly lost on my own repeatedly doing bland, boring story quests in the hopes that it would hold my hand and eventually give the progressively higher-tiered gear for me.
SOLO is a themepark MMO in every sense of the word. I don’t have much experience in MMOs, as I’ve only really played Runescape, Ragnarok Online, Guild Wars 2, New World, a private russian WoW server, Age of Wushu, and SOLO. Just to clarify, a “themepark MMO” is one which sets goals and objectives for the player to go through in order to level up and reach the same endgame of every other player, whether it be PVP or Guild Raids, etc. Initially, I assumed that “themepark MMO” was a derogatory label that meant that a game was simply a copy-paste of WoW with a different thematic skin, such as WoW with kung fu and jade beauties.
SOLO may not be a WoW clone, but it is indeed a themepark MMO with kung fu and jade beauties. It is so linear it hurts. Everything about the quest and instance design which the game disguises as “stories” directs the player to reach endgame as fast as possible, and undergo the same weekly/daily raids to farm for materials to level up their pet and gear. SOLO should deserve credit for making the level cap so small, at least, the non-gear related level of the player, as the max level is 36, which upon surpassing you become the weirdly titled “Student 1” (I guess the best master is the one that keeps learning?). The game does not encourage open world exploration whatsoever with its myriad quests you pick up along the way, cluttering your UI with reminders to wait until a very specific hour and day of the weekend to start this one quest or return to Cloudrise for the millionth time to use its teleporting map once your own Cirrus teleportation skill is busy on the 60 minute cooldown like overdue library returns in your inbox. Seriously, take a look at anyone streaming the game, and tell me that UI would compel the average player to go exploring leisurely or playing casually. UI and quest design aside, the design of the maps themselves is…decent.
The world is already based on the universe of Sword of Legends’ canon movies and books. The design of the cities and rural chinese countryside is grand but compact, which is a huge plus since a lot of singleplayer Chinese RPGS such as Gujian 3 and Sword and Fairy 7 (see this video to get what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5cwsKWDp94) suffer from the huge daoist-originated mentality that one is part of nature, rather than nature is formed by or around the individual, a philosophy great in designing architecture and world wonders but terrible for gaming. There won’t be many moments where you’ll find yourself wasting your time exploring a route only to be met with a dead end, that is- if you’ll even take your time exploring in the first place. At a glance, the backdrop for the cities and your character are indeed screenshot-worthy and satisfy that wanderlust we all have for wanting to take selfies amidst floating cities and condor-filled blue skies. This world that has a beautiful face but lacking in character (“lifeless”) would be improved if the player was rewarded with other tasks to do such as actual things to gather other than generic multi-colored rocks littered all over the land, which spit out a RNG-item to the player after waiting anywhere from 5–20 seconds to “extract/mine/loot.”
Seriously, why make gathering take so long in this game, when it’s already been reduced to such a simplistic and boring process? In some story quests the gathering bar takes almost 30 seconds to finish. Just make it 5 minutes so I can finish a chapter of ISSTH or RI on my phone, why create such a distant, disengaging experience for your player? And don’t think I haven’t noticed the sprite graphics for the gathering animation…it’s literally the exact same from Guild Wars 2. That takes points away in my book!
So resource-acquiring and crafting are overly simplified, barely anybody cooks or fishes either as they’re vastly unimportant compared to the actual core gameloop of queuing for raids which reward you with these “mystery parchments” to craft better gear and stuff. There’s not much else for the player to do. In the best Chinese-made games available on steam, the minigames always added up to be more than the sum of its parts (i.e. Chinese parents, Amazing cultivator simulator). There are surprisingly no puzzles in this fantasy rpg, aside from a couple from the beginning class quests such as Bard. The most effort I’ve seen put into a minigame was in this card game with images of the stories’ characters that basically plays like Ma Jiang or poker, and that in itself is difficult to learn if you don’t know Chinese. You can rely on the AI to play for you if you can’t bother yourself to learn the rules and traditional Chinese characters on the cards, but the bot has a pitifully long countdown so what I’ve taken to doing was have it play card games while resetting every 10 minutes while I’m afk writing this review, which leads to the next point.
For a game whose lore includes cultivation (key: includes, not centered around it), SOLO really does not emphasize on the idle, breathing and patient aspect of cultivation! For those not in the know on the cultivation genre of Chinese fantasy, it involves meditation and literally gaining power from doing nothing but breathing in qi to level up one’s cultivation base and ascend the ladder to immortality, etc. Inevitably, in a thematically-similar game as its predecessor Age of Wushu, I’m going to have to compare this aspect of AFK or idle gaming with SOLO which I have so far kindly resisted in doing for every single aspect of this game’s critique. Age of Wushu rewarded players not only with (shallow) daily log-in rewards, but it also incentivized players to STAY in the game, even if they weren’t actively engaging in it, with their unique experience-conversion system that can best be described as your in-game stomach digesting the experience you’ve just eaten from performing auxiliary life skills (mini-games) or slaughtering other NPCs. It was a cool and arguably, more realistic and definitely the most immersive leveling experience true to the Wuxia AND Xianxia genre, because true to “cultivation,” it rewarded the player for simply doing nothing and…breathing. In contrast, I can’t idle in SOLO and slowly metabolize my experience, I don’t GET any more experience per se after reaching “Student One,” I can only level up my “Gear level” through endless, brutal grinding from the weeklies/raids. WHERE is the cultivation? Where is the unique “MMO experience unlike any other” promised years ago by this company?
Instead, you progress “naturally” through allotting your “astral points” which are the replacement for the traditional meridians in a Wuxia novel, but mechanically these are nothing special or unique from any other RPG leveling system. You queue up anywhere from the game world for pvp matchoffs and raids, just like most Eastern MMOs. You spend generations and aeons grinding to keep up with everybody else, just like most MMOs. Where is the innovation?
Here are immediate, quick ways I would suggest to improve Sword of Legends:
Make the mounts better. WHY is the fastest and only mount that allows verticality in movement (meaning you can fly) the beginner sword mount, called a Yujian in chinese? Why are all the subsequent mounts unable to fly, and yet, cannot travel faster? Aside from cosmetics, what’s the point of these inferior mounts?
Implement more mini-games.
MAKE THE MINI GAMES FUN. Here’s an immediate idea, free of charge: since the sword mount is the first and basic mount, you should make riding more dynamic and engaging! Make the player have the option to pursue wind currents or I don’t know, concentrate his qi properly to travel just a little bit faster to make those long travels from one end of the map to another much more engaging and fun!
Relocate the budget from the voice acting. Move them into designing the mini-games or improving the game mechanics immediately. Voice acting is expensive, and I believe they hired the actual actors that voice the characters and you can only imagine how much that is costing the developers when they should be using that RMB for making a better game. No one cares about the story. It should go without saying that the english voice acting shouldn’t even be bothered with, it’s better to simply delete all the voice files that are English in a subsequent patch.
While the game is not unsalvageable, Sword of Legend Online is not a game for everyone. If you’re a WoW veteran, enjoy weekly raids and the brutal Eastern grinding mentality with an Ancient Chinese aesthetic, this game is everything you ever wanted. I’ve met many players who happily toss money at the in-game cash shop for the cosmetics, and they have tons of fun casually doing instance runs and timing this one adorable “cat dance” in-game emoji on time. I can confirm that the game is certainly NOT pay-to-win, which it has stayed true to since the time of its release. Other issues that SOLO has conquered since its initial release are optimization, I’ve had consistently around 60 fps while playing, with very little server issues in the EST region of the USA, and the game has never crashed for me once.
If you have a gaming PC with top run specs and a steam library of more than 20 games, you might not find yourself returning to this title. If you’re a hardcore MMORPG fan with actual standards, you might not find this as boring and average as any other themepark eastern MMO.
Until then, here are alternatives to SOLO that you can play if you just absolutely need to scratch that Wuxia/Xianxia/Ancient chinese fantasy itch.
Justice Online. The combat and graphics are even better. Good luck getting a Chinese phone number tho.
Age of Wushu. It’s a little unfair comparing the sheer amount of what a player can do in a sandbox MMO compared to a themepark like SOLO, but the fact that it’s a decade older than SOLO gives it a fair handicap in this comparison. Age of Wushu has older graphics that still look absolutely fantastic, but everything to its complicated combat, leveling system and “life skills” such as farming, cooking, calligraphy and playing Chinese guqin hero mean you can spend hours without a goal and still have more meaningful fun than competing with other mainland robots in SOLO in the same raid or dissing them over pvp. Even the music is just far better, more consistent and memorable in Age of Wushu than SOLO’s, and I assure you that’s not nostalgia speaking. Try doing studying or reading webnovels to the soundtrack of both games, and tell me which one you find more Chinese-y and just flat-out objectively better.
Amazing Cultivator Simulator. If you play MMORPGs chances are you enjoy watching numbers rise and anything to do with the accrual of benefits. This game is a love letter to all Xianxia fans, and although it isn’t rpg, its complexity and richness of things to discover as a colony sim makes it a far more worthy sink of your time than actually sitting down and reading the bland NPC dialogue that composes of SOLO’s individual biography quests.
Tale of Immortal. This game is also a love letter to Xianxia fans and holy crap does it deliver. If someone can figure out how to make a multiplayer game like this, even if it was limited to 2D, I almost guarantee it would be a success, I would play the hell out of it. You owe it to yourself to play this game if you have ever touched a cultivation manhua or webnovel in your life.
