I got to play the closed beta of Conqueror’s Blade , a lavish MMO about medieval battles from a team with former Halo developers at the helm. It comes out almost simultaneously with another large-scale medieval game – Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but completely network, and not single-player, and combines the usual “hack” from the third person with siege battles of huge armies.
An attempt to show huge historical battles from the battlefield was made in Total War, but Spartan: Total Warrior, released in 2005, did not have much success. And here’s a fresh look at the role of a general who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.
Online siege from several former Bungie employees
During the beta testing stage, which will last until February 4, the game on the one hand shows an amazing technological implementation, and on the other – creepy glitches. For example, depending on the position of the camera, my character’s face was invisible or psychedelic, and strange angular artifacts were constantly twitching all over the screen.
However, the online game, pitting huge armies against each other, seasoning them with battering rams, siege towers and catapults is a rather entertaining sight.
Powerful online battles with a huge number of participants were borrowed in some way from For Honor from Ubisoft, whose modest successes undoubtedly made the authors of all other games about historical battles stop and think, but here everything is completely different.
There are certain similarities, at least in general terms – you choose a class, and then run with a bunch of NPC fighters and fight with a bunch of people (or, in this case, sometimes shoot them), remembering to constantly improve old equipment. However, Blade’s approach is generally more strategic, with an emphasis on building your fighters into different formations and using different siege vehicles if you want to take over a castle.
This is by no means a Total War, but understanding how formations with shifted shields, columns and ranks work will help you a lot. A significant share of my so far poor game experience was occupied by the constant distribution of orders to my subordinates to follow me, pick up or replace equipment, while the battles themselves boiled down to banal melee, where you run around and hit enemies from behind. But this was an early experience, when I still couldn’t do anything. If you chat in the general chat, things get more complicated and there are many more secrets of the strengths and weaknesses of your NPCs.
Conqueror’s Blade is not positioned as an RPG, and it’s fair to say that there are quite a few skills and quests in it, although you will pump and earn or buy equipment upgrades, for example, swords with increased piercing or blunt damage and all that. From what I’ve seen, there are quite a few stats here, but on the battlefield, it mostly depends on the total damage. True, this applies to low levels: I will not say if I can penetrate spearmen in heavy armor without a suitable weapon.
The game is strictly PVP focused, with different factions fighting for control of a large open world, reminiscent of the legendary showdown in Planetside. And although you can in some way avoid this big war and just work on pumping your character and his army, at the moment there is no PVE element in the game.
If you’re in a fight, there are two options. The fastest and most productive is to click the big red Join the Battle button and wait your turn without doing anything else. These “waiting rooms” are one of the reminders of what MMORPGs were like decades ago.
When the battle begins, it looks like a huge historical Battlefield. Together with other players and dozens of their fighters, you simply play the world’s largest capture of the flag. You need to storm the fortress, killing enemy players and their soldiers, breaking through the gate with battering rams and climbing the walls using siege towers. Once inside, it is required to hold the control point for a certain time.
Another option is to travel through a large but flat outer world, similar to Google Maps, in which you and your soldiers will almost certainly bump into another such traveler or enter enemy territory. Also on this screen, you can “extract” resources to buy and improve soldiers, as well as pay for more ambitious goals.
Technically, this part of the game is considered a “sandbox”, but in practice it slightly resembles the strategy map in Total War or Civilizaton in real time. It’s not really an exploration of the world, although I would be interested to see how things would look here with enough players. But even with that said, this world does not look empty – there is already an alarming number of high-level players, and in this game, with a difference of ten levels, a more advanced player will be practically invulnerable for you. So be careful.
In battle, you need to manually control your character and simultaneously issue orders to subordinates. At the right level of implementation, this is a great system, but at the moment it seems a little useless. There are many menus, they are inconvenient, and the commands overlap.
There are certain hints of harsh Asian MMOs, which amassed an army of fans in the mid-2000s yearning for a WoW replacement, from the introduction of hotspots, shops, and faction quests to the inordinate amount of things you need to buy or find to level up your army. The division into levels is very strict. As I said, a fight with a player ten levels higher is suicide, but I don’t know what happens when everyone is pumped to high levels, and the whole difference will be in specific fighters and equipment.
Despite the promising potential of a big world in an endless war for territory, everything looks rather pointless – a crowd of anonymous people are just trying to kill each other, no one is fighting for any serious goals (although in the chat channels they constantly, sometimes rather awkwardly, boast about how English-speaking players have piled on crowd of Chinese).
Verdict
The game is incredibly entertaining and it’s really cool to watch whole armies fighting from such a close distance, but I got the impression that there is too much useless fuss in it at the moment. Yes, here is a view of the mass battles of Total War through the eyes of a soldier, but so far it seems to me that the time spent here is more important than military cunning.
