You know what? After playing approximately 13 hours of Revelation Online.. it genuinely isn’t that bad of a game at its core.
I legitimately do not think I’ve ever seen an emptier MMO than this, though, yet somehow it remains online. I guess the playerbase must expend quite a bit of money to warrant that.

Now welcome back to another episode of “Is it worth playing” – where we sift through every MMORPG available right now in an attempt to find the best MMORPG in 2021. Today, we’re taking a look at what was arguably one of the largest flops of the last decade: Revelation Online.
Why was it such a large flop? Oh don’t worry. We’re gonna get into that.

So Revelation Online. This game had the potential to be SO good. Unbelievably, unquestionably good. At the time of its release, the market needed something like this. Something that looked as good as this looked. That played as well as it played. That presented players with the features that really allowed for it to stand out.
But My.GAMES’s poor handling, lack of content, repetitious grind and poor business model really inhibited any chance this game had of being a success. But that was then. This is now. The game at the end of 2021 is an entirely different experience than it was back when it launched years ago.
But is that for the better? Ehhh.

Even in 2021, Revelation Online holds up graphically. The game provides some decent character creation – allowing players to create something… incredible. Or incredibly lacking.
And with the addition of some outfits, that’s pretty much the extent with which you can customize your character.
The world looks great. The textures definitely need some updating, granted, and some of the models of both enemies and NPCs are… questionable. But this game feels like you’re playing through a Chinese Anime series.
The world itself is completely open. There are no segregated zones – everything is accessible without the need to trigger any type of loading screen. With the exception of dungeons, raids and instanced PvP.
The cities are large and sprawling. Filled with NPCs – giving the illusion of life, to an otherwise empty game and world.

An active population isn’t everything, though. MMOs like Vindictus or Mabinogi are proof of that.
If a game has a dedicated community, players that genuinely love the game they’re playing, it’ll never truly die. Unless the publisher shuts the servers down. Like Gamigo. Or Nexon. Or Gameforge. Or… well, you guys get the drift.
Gameplay is typically crucial to keeping a community of players together playing. Well, gameplay and content. If a game doesn’t receive content at least periodically, the game will grow stagnant and only the most dedicated players will continue to log in.
However, with even a couple updates per year, a game with fantastic combat like Vindictus or Continent of the Ninth will continue to flourish. Depending on your definition of “flourish,” of course.
Combat in Revelation Online is.. an interesting hybrid of action and tab-target. When beginning the game, you’re given the option of selecting between both traditional, and action game modes.
I would like to point out that for the most part, the “action” aspect of this is more just possessing the ability to place your AoEs. That’s it. Everything else requires a target. So “hybrid combat” is used quite loosely.
Although for a mostly tab-target MMO that gives the illusion of action combat, it’s genuinely not bad. Abilities looked good. Character movement was.. kinda fluid? A little clunky, but no more so than any other Chinese MMO.

There are mounts present, which makes traversing the world… well, not difficult at all. But more impressive than traditional mounts, is the fact that you CAN fly! There is a fully functional flight system in-game, allowing for you to fly without limitation. As opposed to games like Aion that impose a duration on the feature.
Additionally, there’s a teleport function, allowing for you to teleport almost anywhere. This makes traversing the world pretty quick, easy, and.. well, with the auto-pathing to quest objectives, a somewhat boring feature.
I’ve noticed that Chinese MMOs have an unusual obsession with auto-pathing. Not auto-combat, but auto-pathing.
Perfect World does it, Moonlight Blade does it, Swords of Legends Online does it, and Revelation Online does it. Now it’s up to you to decide whether or not you use it, but it’s just…. interesting to have there and not make use of, you know? It’s not game breaking, but it does provide you time to tab-out and watch some Youtube or Netflix.

For all its positives and negatives, however, Revelation Online suffers from a single flaw that makes it 100% unquestionably worth avoiding: It gates EVERYTHING behind levels. You’re required to hit a certain level to continue with the story, which isn’t typically an issue. Many MMOs do this.
Yet the story provides an odd level or two at a time, then locks you out of progressing until you meet the new requirement, often at least 3 to 5 more levels away.
Now they give you items every day for logging in, you can participate in daily quests like the Seeking Spirits daily that requires 3 players to do – but honestly… if you can’t play for more than a few hours at a time, what motivation are you going to have to continue to log in?
I was locked out of the game after playing on stream for about 2 hours. Then when I attempted to stream it the next day I got maybe 90 minutes out of it before being locked out again, requiring several levels that I couldn’t achieve in a single day because I couldn’t do the dailies due to a lack of players to group with.
So I spent the entire next week logging in to do a single daily, obtaining approximately a level up per day until I was so far ahead in level, I figured I’d get at least 2 or 3 more streams out of it.
Boy was I wrong. After progressing for a few more hours, my story bugged. Which was frustrating, as that entire event takes about 15 to 20 minutes to complete. So I redid it. And it bugged again.
I later figured out that one of the recent updates bugged that story quest, and as such I couldn’t continue. I tried multiple times, on more than one day, just to see if I couldn’t progress further to acquire additional footage but this game would not let me.
Which means I hit a wall that cannot be passed right now, and My.GAMES are doing absolutely nothing to remedy that.

✔️ Revelation Online still looks pretty good.

✔️ It doesn’t play half bad either.

✔️ The world is enormous and open, providing a lot of freedom to traverse it at your own pace.

❎ Yet the world itself is dead. Empty. There is absolutely no reason to explore anything it has to offer.

❎ The story is so disconnected and disjointed that it may as well not even be present.

❎ The leveling experience is atrocious. Perhaps one of the worst I’ve ever had the displeasure of progressing through.

❎ The playerbase is.. well, I saw one person reply in world chat when I asked if anyone was playing during peak hours. So not completely dead, but for all intents and purposes, should be.

❎ So much of the game is gated behind levels and dailies that I assure you nobody wants to participate in for the 765th day in a row.

❎ The game really shouldn’t advertise its combat like it does when it’s essentially a glorified tab-target combat system. Which isn’t a bad system, but… you’re lying if you say it isn’t.

Ultimately, Revelation Online isn’t as bad as people complain it is. Not at its core. Yes, gating content behind an arduous daily login is one of the most atrocious things I’ve ever seen.
I get this is a way to motivate players to log in every day, but come on. There is nobody there to group up and do this with if you’re a new player.
The game still looks good enough and plays good enough. There’s plenty to do, plenty to see and… as a game overall, it really isn’t bad. Just aspects of it are. Aspects you cannot overcome.

It’s been a while since I dipped my toes into Revelation Online. 2 years, I believe? Since the last video I did was back during the middle of 2019. And the experience I had this time ’round was drastically different to the experience I had back then. Which is to be expected.
Years have passed. A lot has happened, both in terms of development, and with regards to the players that once actively populated the game – players that have more or less moved on to greener pastures.

So upon first loading into Revelation Online, I realized that we have a new introductory experience to the game. This new zone is stunning – but an issue I quickly ran into was that there were invisible walls in place that prevent you from really moving anywhere other than forward.
This provides a very linear introduction – one that replaced the much more open newbie zone that was once present.
While this was quite off-putting, I pushed through regardless. Then you’re thrown directly into the main game, without much in the way of direction or side content. You quickly learn that there is a “main scenario” questline that you follow, leading you from area to area.
But you outlevel it quite rapidly, being required to grind – quite repetitiously I might add, daily quests in an attempt to break through the unusual level gating that is noticeably prevalent throughout the course of the game.
Every 5 levels, I’d be met with a message that told me “You need to be 5 levels higher to continue. Go do dailies until you level up and come back!” Those dailies, in specific, were tied to group content part of the time, and could not be taken in a group smaller than 3 people.
Considering I never saw another player… yes, leveling turned out to be an absolutely atrocious experience that I would not be interested in doing ever again.

Graphically, the game holds up pretty well. Aesthetically, the world still looks bright, vibrant and beautiful. Characters.. less so. The game is definitely beginning to show its age, much faster than other titles in the genre, and that is especially true for the combat.
I’ve honestly played Mobile MMOs with better combat than Revelation Online had, and considering Swords of Legends Online does what Revelation Online did, but to a degree of success, I can’t see anyone ever stepping foot into Revelation Online again after SOLO launches later this year.
It’s a shame that the world feels so empty, so void of life. This was a game that I genuinely felt would be worth dedicating time to when it launched. Boy was I wrong!

Years later, the game is–or, has been on its last legs for a while now, and shows no signs of improvement. Either with regards to the terrible leveling experience or content that would attract players back to the game.
This is a sad state for any MMO to be in, but it’s definitely deserved.

Man it’s been a while since I last dove into Revelation Online. Like, 2 years? 2 and a half years? And.. not much has changed, unfortunately.
MrsStix and I were feeling a little.. nostalgic, see, Revelation was an MMO we both played shortly before getting together. It was an MMO we never got to experience with one another.
Yet we both had fond memories of a beautiful world filled with things to do and places to explore.
With this in mind, we decided it was a great opportunity to download the game and try it out together – see how it plays in 2019, going into 2020.

These are my thoughts and impressions on the way to.. level 40? level 41?

There are 7 classes in total: Occultist, Spirit Shaper, Vanguard, Assassin, Blademaster, Gunslinger, and Swordmage.
I wanted to go Swordmage because they not only look like a badass class to play, but also because I’m a fan of mage classes, so naturally. That’s it.

I ended up begrudgingly opting for Vanguard because I wanted to tank dungeons for the wife and I. I felt like, since she went Occultist, having 2 mages would make for impossible dungeons.
I remember back when Revelation launched I was thoroughly impressed by the character creation.
While I still am – and don’t get me wrong, the character creator is very good, providing a lot of customization over my character, it isn’t nearly to the same degree as I once was.
I just felt that overall, I didn’t have the control over my body or face that I wanted. But nevertheless, I made a pretty damn good looking dude if I do say so myself. Looks just like me.

Then came the tutorial zone.. and the realization that the combat wasn’t action, but instead, a strange hybrid of action and tab-target.
I’d honestly forgotten that was a thing. It’s been so long since I even touched Revelation that I’d completely omitted that from memory.
And man the whole “talk to people using F and then finish the conversation you’re having with space-bar” was real grating.

The tutorial zone was the same as always: Some kid tries to kill you, some pervy kid is into some shapeshifting chick, we all sit around a campfire singing kumbaya.. you know.
Then the island we’re on is attacked, and.. the end. We saved everyone, and depart for a grand adventure.

It was at this point that I began to pay less attention to the story. Mainly because it was gated, along with progression advancement itself, behind level requirements.
I cannot stress how strongly I dislike content being level-gated.
By the time we had hit level 20, we’d finished both the orange and yellow quests, meaning all we could do to level further, was to do dailies that required a party of at least 3 people, or dungeons, which.. yeah.
We tried dungeons just the two of us and we got our asses handed to us on a platter. And the platter looked like it hadn’t been washed in.. a very long time.
Which may or may not be a jab at the population issues the game has currently.
I’m not really fond of dailies, not since Mists of Pandaria in World of Warcraft ruined them for me, but putting a group-size requirement on dailies that are all but a necessity to advance is.. well, it makes it difficult.

But, we continued on – even in the face of adversity. Finally, we found a group running dailies that would help us get past level 25 and at last be capable of progressing.
This group took us to the Seeking Spirits daily – which, even after finishing it I’m still not sure exactly what happened.
We had a permanent auto-follow on the group leader whenever we weren’t engaged in combat and I couldn’t figure out how to disable that, so I just went on my phone and watched Youtube videos whenever I wasn’t in combat.

By the time MrsStix and I had finished all of the available dailies with the help of the aforementioned group, we were level 36. That was a significant boost considering we were level 22? 23? when we started.
We’d figured that we would have plenty to do now since surely the story wouldn’t catch up to us that quickly.. right? Hahaha.. ahh, if only that were true. You’re gated behind being level 40 to continue, so.. yeah.

After a long while we managed to hit level 40 and continue with the story some more, but at level 41 we decided it was time to call it a day.
We hadn’t seen anyone around while leveling, we hadn’t seen anyone around while questing. There was the occasional message in the chat window by someone talking in world chat but otherwise, the chat was silent.
We tried doing dungeons but the two of us together couldn’t tackle the difficulty we wanted, and there was nobody ever available to party and run them with.
We had hit a level capable of doing PvP, but couldn’t find anyone queueing for PvP. There were even mentions in world chat asking for people to queue for PvP so they’d have someone to actually fight.
That right there is a bad sign of a dead game.

Revelation Online is a damn good looking game. The environments are absolutely stunning – I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that says Revelation actually looks ugly.
The combat was highly disappointing for me, having only a couple actual skills by level 40. The mostly tab-target combat with the illusion of action-themes really confused me, and left me wanting more out of it.
But overall it wasn’t terrible. I’ve experienced much worse.
Level-gating content is a very poor design choice. I know it’s technically done in WoW, Final Fantasy XIV and other large games, but normally if you do the main story and do the odd dungeon here or there you’re typically ahead.
That may or may not be the case here. When the game was packed with players, it may have been much easier to level as you’d have groups forming for content regularly.
However with the current state of the playerbase – which is very likely only a handful of people playing, the new player experience is one of the worst I’ve seen.
Blade & Soul and TERA both have easy progression. And while I believe there should be a challenge involved in progressing through the game, I would take easy over impossible any day.

The game is set in a giant open world.
When opening the map and seeing that there are literally no boundaries stopping you from going anywhere or doing anything, you can’t help but be taken over by a sense of adventure and exploration.
Yet the game-world itself is empty and void of personality. The environments are absolutely stunning, yet there’s nothing to do in them.
Yes, you can pick up the odd sidequest here or there but for the most part.. you can either auto-path directly to your quest objective, or.. fly manually, typically in a straight, linear fashion to your quest objective.
Either way, the game does not in any form promote exploration.
Once I’d obtained my wings I thought to myself “Sweet, now I can just fly out and.. Iunno. Just do whatever I want.” When in reality, what I was left with was.. a linear progression system.

Revelation Online could have been an amazing game. Could have being the keyword here.
Instead, what we got was an auto-pathing MMO-simulator. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not hating on the game, there are parts of this game that are truly outstanding, but the majority of it is very underwhelming.
If someone were to ask me if I could recommend Revelation in 2019 I’d have to say no. The playerbase is all but gone, the combat, the performance issues, the level-gating and lack of content.. are all still very present.
The developers and publishers both continue to every so often release new content but they seem to lack the knowledge on how to fix the fundamental issues that prevent the game from actually being a good MMORPG.
So while I did enjoy playing through this with my wife initially, as we continued our journey it became a convoluted mess of “wait so what are we doing now?” and “okay, let’s just wait and see if anyone wants to group up.”

So is Revelation Online worth playing in 2019?
I don’t believe it is. I’m sorry for those of you that play the game, but getting to endgame is one of the biggest chores I’ve ever seen and I’ve hit endgame in quite a few MMOs over my life of playing in the genre.
If you want to try the game out for yourself though, you’re more than welcome to take a look and see if your opinions mirror my own.
While I would love to continue further into the game so I could see what endgame is like, I don’t think I have the patience to wait for the almost non-existant groups to form for all of the content gated behind level requirements.

It has recently been announced that Revelation Online will be joining the ranks of My.com’s other MMORPGs Skyforge and Armored Warfare on Steam in the near future.
To access the game through Steam, players will have to launch the game through My.com’s altered Steam version of their GameCenter. Doing so will log players in directly via their Steam accounts.

In celebration of its upcoming release onto Steam, My.com have prepared special competitions with varied prizes for players to participate in.

“The availability of Revelation Online on Steam is exciting for a number of reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is that it’ll share the same space as hundreds of great games and allow access to Steam’s vast community and features, such as the Steam forums, Broadcasting and Trading Cards.
True, similar features have long been part of the My.com GameCenter or available in-game already, but Steam’s popularity as the world’s largest PC games distribution platform makes it a fertile hunting ground for recruiting new players to Revelation Online’s cause.”

While no additional details on Revelation Online’s Steam release have been given, we are told that more details will be revealed soon.

In a move that seems aimed at fixing Revelation Online’s population issues, the First Contact patch has been released.

This patch introduces cross-server PvP to the game, meaning lower population servers won’t struggle as much to fill up battlefields.

Alongside the cross server features a German and French language client has also been released, and English language localisations have been improved. A new EU server has also been opened for anyone wanting to start fresh.

See the full patch notes on the official Revelation Online website, Here.

The new Anniversary Fortune Egg event has been added to the game. On Saturdays and Sundays you can take the quest from Dan Dan at the Sulan Bridge to win event rewards as well as Red and Azure ticket.

Given how quickly the hype for Revelation Online died out on it’s launch, I’m not convinced these steps will be enough to fix the game’s population issues and dividing up the game’s population even more with another new server also seems counter productive to me.

What do you think? Will cross-server PvP help breathe some life back in to Revelation Online? What else could they do? Do these changes make you want to pick Revelation Online back up again, if you are a player who quit? leave a comment below!