We take a look at Echo of Soul for our next “Things You Would Change About” article. The game follows a classic MMORPG theme-park style where players take on the role of a Soulkeeper and complete quests and adventures through the world, heading into increasingly more difficult zones and dungeons as they increase their character abilities.

With a fairly compact set of features the game, at least on paper, seems to offer most of what you could want from an MMORPG but there’s a few things we don’t like that we’d love to see changed…

• Co-Op Soul Purifying System - Working with players to get purifying boosts seems pointless. In game you kill mobs and absorb their Chaos souls, as a soulkeeper you can then purify them into one of four skills/abilities to use yourself to give a small temporary buff. Purifying souls on your own you get the minimum output for your efforts, however, simply by clicking on another player in the world and co-op purifying means you can both get more purifies souls for your moneys’ worth. Now we like the Soul system in general, and we like that working with other players gives you a boost, but the system in place feels so pointless as it doesn’t require anything more involved than clicking another random player who passes by (who typically always accept if they have some chaos souls of their own) and so doesn’t really prompt any social co-op/working together as a team aspect. Instead of rewarding players for barely engaging with each other we think that you shouldn’t get more purified souls when working with another player, but instead get double the initial chaos souls dropped from enemies when fighting with someone when in a formed group and thus encouraging players to play with each other for longer.


• Instanced Areas - The game is broken up into too many instances. Whilst traveling around the world you will periodically enter a new area that will load itself as a separate instance, generally for technical reasons so as to not overwhelm the servers if too many people are in one place. However, whilst this is all well and good and not exactly something we haven’t seen before (Neverwinter, Star Wars: The Old Republic) the sheer number of instances in Echo of Soul is… staggering. Everything seems to be an instance, even the smallest areas that take about 20 seconds to cross and link one zone to another, they have a loading screen at the beginning and the end. Aside from the constant string of annoying loading screens it really breaks the immersion that this is an open sandbox world, in fact it’s far from it, the population is completely divided up into these instances and if they have to have even the smallest areas an instance then we can’t imagine that you’ll see many players gathered together in an area.


• Arena PVP Matchmaking - Players of all levels are matched up for PVP. From level 10 the PVP battle arenas open up and you can queue to join them; early access PVP Arenas is great, however, the Matchmaking doesn’t bracket players into levels and will put level 10 players in the same match as level 60 players, who have far wider range of skills, better gear and higher stats and can literally one hit kill you. Now this is an issue because with such a low population it’s hard to fill all the spaces in a team for PVP without having crazy long queues. Honestly we’d say that until the Devs knew whether or not they were going to have a big hit on their hands they should have prepared for lower numbers, have games require smaller group sizes (currently 15 v 15) and so that the entire arena doesn’t feel empty then make them much smaller; particularly the capture the point map with five different capture points: completely unnecessary.


• The Name - Echo of Soul just doesn’t sound right. From the very first time we even heard the name it’s just one of those titles that you think is being pronounced wrong, or is a bad translation and is meant to be Echo of Souls, or Echoes of Souls, or Echoes of the Soul…. Either way the name sounds weird and we wish they’d change it.


• Generic - There’s really nothing that stands out in the game. From the rather dated rinse and repeat quest types (go kill X number of monsters), the limited and uninspiring classes, the dated graphics, and the all too familiar UI and controls.. it’s a style of game that has been cloned a thousand times and just doesn’t do anything ground-breaking. Aside from having a more dubious cash shop than other MMORPGs of the same style, it’s not necessarily a bad MMORPG, everything it does it does fairly well, but it’s not that hard to copy a tried and tested formula that has worked for the last decade. What would we change? The developer philosophy of trying to milk the same format over and over, make a quick cash grab through the shop and then be left with a mediocre MMORPG.

These are some of the things that we would change about Echo of Soul, but what do you think? What would you change about this game? Would you add anything else to the list? We await your opinions! Let us know!!!!!

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2015 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Puedes dejar una respuesta, o un trackback desde tu sitio web.