Conquer Online
Conquer Online is made by TQ Digital. Originally a Chinese game, Conquer became english a few years back and since then… Not much has changed. At all. What you see in Conquer right now, could have been implemented YEARS ago. This is the major problem with TQ. They’re lazy as hell. They never listen to customers, and when they do, it takes forever. There are glitches present now that have been around since the BETA TEST. Yeah, that’s how bad the support for Conquer is. Despite the thousands of dollars TQ gets from unwitting teens who are willing to drop cash for instant access to the best gear, they still feel no type of dedication to provide an enjoyable and bug free playing experience.
Enough about TQ and its shoddy business practices, I’ll get to the rest.
Graphics: 8/10
The graphics are pretty dang nice. The game has an overhead view, 2D world with 3D characters/monsters/npcs. All the 2D backgrounds look amazing, though some are really overused in seemingly useless maps that serve no purpose but to put distance between places, and sometimes not even for that. There was a”big” update last year where all the weapon and skill animations got upgraded, including a re-vamped interface. It all looks very nice, but could and should have been around, like, 3 years ago.
Music/Sound Effects: 2/10
There is no music in this game. Unless you go next to special teleportation stones made for the Taoist class, even then it’s a 4 second clip. That’s it. Considering the feel the game gives and is SUPPOSED to give to the player there should be very epic music all throughout this game. The problem with no music is it makes it MUCH harder for the player to become immersed in the world. I mean, if having no music was a gimmick, and they just relied on birds chirping and crickets, leaves rustling and such, made good use of those kind of sound effects, that would be ok. But they don’t. The sound effects in general range from annoying to decent. There are good slicing and magic sound effects, most monster growls are annoying and considering you spend all your time in this game constantly grinding, that ain’t good(more on this later).
Gameplay: 5/10
Gameplay in Conquer consists of killing stuff, finding loot, selling loot, repeat. That’s it. That is all you will do from the day you start the game to the day you uninstall it(which might be the same day for a lot of people). This system on its own is the core for any MMORPG. But this core is all that Conquer is. The quests suck. They’re horrible and do not give substantial rewards. If you don’t have rare items it will take you FOREVER to level. There are 130(pretty sure) levels in Conquer. When you get to around 120, depending on your class, you get to start over as another class(get “reborn”) while retaining some skills from the previous and getting a guard who attacks whatever you attack. This is actually the coolest feature of Conquer. Unfortunately most people will give up at level 70 because the grind is just too much.
The game never gets substantially easier unless you get the best gear possible, which is impossible without spending real money to purchase Conquer’s special item dubbed “Dragonballs”. Dragonballs are used to upgrade the quality(rarity) of weapons/armor or to add a socket(up to 2) to weapons. And it doesn’t take just one. The amount needed varies on the level and quality of the equipment you want to upgrade. There are two ways to upgrade, use one DB(Dragonball) at a certain upgrader which has a chance to fail, or use anywhere between 4 and 8(for example) to get a guaranteed upgrade. Dragonballs can be found as monster loot, but the drop rate is so high, you’ll be lucky if you see ONE after killing 500k enemies.
The quality of rares goes like this; Normal, Refined, Unique, Elite, Super. Refined drop at around 1 per every up to 10k enemies, Unique around 1 per every 20-30k, Elite around 1 per every 150k, lastly Super clocks in at around 800k for one. These are just estimates, but feel free to ask at the Conquer forum for real numbers. Shouldn’t be too far off. By adding sockets to equipment(or finding equip with sockets) you can put gems in them. Gems can be mined and add various effects like 10% more exp, 5% more atk. Gems also have quality; Normal, Refined and Super. It can literally take 2 days of mining to get 2 normal gems. Want a refined? Prepare to spend WEEKS mining to get one. Super? I hope you don’t have a social life. This is the way Conquer generally works, lots of effort with minimal reward. Or in some cases, no reward. It’s almost a content tease, that makes people want to keep playing just to get SOMETHING new.
All weapons and character classes have unique skills/spells. Some are nicely done, a lot of the weapons are specialized for either leveling or PK combat. Generally the weapons with Area of Effect skills are the leveling weapons and the single hit brute force/range attack skilled weapons are for PK. Unfortunately this is broken. Clubs are the weapons of choice for any melee unit in Conquer. Why? The skill they possess is AoE. They also have the highest max damage of ANY weapon in the game. So unless you want to spend twice or even THREE times as long leveling with a sword/hook/dagger(god help you)/scepter/blade you’re gonna pick up a club. All the other AoE weapons are 2 handed as well, this imparts some balance to THEM. Meanwhile if you’re a warrior you can use a Club+Shield and have max attack and max defense. No downside. If you’re a Trojan(can dual wield at level 40) you can use TWO Clubs, or a Club plus any other 1 hander, most people use swords for leveling/blades for PK. So unless you want to lose defense as a warrior by using a 2h or lose double atk as a Trojan you’re going to use a club, no questions. No balance, no variety. You see the same characters with the same equipment setups everywhere. And I have to mention that some of the weapon skills are so useless, they’re not even worth using. Scepters have the same atk as Clubs but their skill only hits one enemy, activates less, and is significantly weaker. HUH?! TQ doesn’t know what logic is.
I’ll just talk about one more class specific thing that ruins the game; Archers. Archers get a skill called Scatter. Scatter hits all enemies on the screen within about a 280 degree radius of where you aim it. Because Archers have the range game they can go to areas where other classes will die pretty easily. There they just Scatter for hours on end, gainly levels fairly quickly(in respect to the other classes). Once archers are around level 87 they become item hunting machines. They just go to a spawn with enemies that they can 1-hit scatter(usually the ape/snake spawn in ape city map 2) and just stay there for hours killing thousands of enemies fairly quickly, all the while racking up rare loot. This way they can provide to buy great equipment. Then when they reach around level 110-120, they go back to where they got their first easy levels where the other classes couldn’t go(Alien Apes/Senior Snakes/Alien Serpents, for those interested) and power level THEIR OWN ALTERNATE ACCOUNTS so that they can reborn them. When a character reborns they get a free SUPER GEM. The next aspect of this horrible system is that Water Taoists, upon reaching level 70 get double exp. This is necessary because Water Taos are a support class. Do they really support? No. The job of Water Taos in this game is to pretty much just revive power leveling characters, and heal/revive in Guild Wars(more on THAT later). So when that archer that wants to farm a super gem goes to make his character guess which class he chooses? That’s right, Taoist(becomes Water Tao at level 40). The last wonderful aspect of this system is that you can get married in the game. When in a team with your spouse you get a double exp bonus. So a male Archer makes a female Water Taoist and voila! Instant %200 exp bonus for power leveling! This has been around for at least 3 years, but only became widespread within the last year or two. TQ has done NOTHING to remedy this except ask players on the forum if they should raise the reborn level requirement for Water Taos. Yes, lets just cripple a character class to punish another. Smart.
Last of all, I have to talk about free PK and Guild Wars. Conquer is unique in the aspect that you can get PKed anywhere. You got a problem with someone? Did they loot you? Kill them on the spot. Towns of course have Guards that will kill any PKers on sight. For attacking/PKing another player you get a flashing blue name. This is a signal that lets others know they can kill you without any detriment. This is very nice. When you PK someone you get some PK points. It takes 15 minutes for 1(ONE) PK point to wear off. Unfortunately this does not deter anyone from abusing the free PK. You have to be aware of what you are carrying at ALL times. Got a super gem in your bag and get PKed? There’s a damn good chance you will drop it. There has been one major complaint with the game since it started. In the starting town there is an upgrade place. Just a while ago it was the only place where you could upgrade certain level items, the same place where you take your chance with a single Dragonball or Meteor(Meteors improve weapon/armor/accessory level-useful on rare items). See the problem here? People would have to go to a free PK area(even though there were guards, people would just have guildmates or have an alt account pick up the loot) with a rare item, a rare upgrade item and just PRAY that someone wouldn’t kill them and make them drop it all. Also, let me tell you, the process for upgrading(pumping a ton of mets into an item) takes a significant amount of time, so you were a sitting duck. Only just last month did they make the starting city map Anti-PK. A problem players BEGGED them to fix for years and only now they do it. I lost a Super +3 Shield Level 100 because of this garbage. Now they fix it. Am I supposed to be impressed? Give me my **** back, then I’ll be satisfied with your craptastic product support.
Now on to Guild Wars. It’s a better game, go buy it.
…seriously though, there is a weekly event where your guild can compete with every other guild on the server to beat the crap out of a pole in the middle of a fort. This pole’s health meter represents the retaining guilds funds. When the pole is defeated, the guild that hit it last takes over. Yay. Guild wars are only participated in by high levels and Water Taos. WTs can go in as early as level 70 for their revive and healing skills. Unless you’re in a new server there’s no reason to go to the guild war. Everyone will be around level 120, reborn, and have a full super set and rape you in two seconds. This feature REALLY needs some balancing issues sorted out. Level divisions would have been nice. Oh well.
Overall: 5/10
Okay, all that being said, the game is addictive. If you make friends(you must, it’s the only way to have fun and keep playing) you should have a pretty fun time. That fun time will be also met with tons of heartache over losing your gear that took months to get to some lousy PKers. You have to constantly be on guard. If you like that kind of style, and don’t mind 90% of the population using the same character builds, go for it. Chances are you will have a lot more fun if you decide to buy your way into nice equipment through real money and Dragonballs though, as much as I HATE supporting the idea of giving TQ money.
http://co.91.com/
