DK Online Game Review

Alternate Title: Dragon Knights
Developer: RPG Factory, SG Internet
Publisher: Mansangsoft
Type: MMORPG
Model: Free-to-play
Platform: PC
PvP: Castle Sieges
PvE: N/A

DK Online is a PvP oriented MMORPG that was re-released in March 2019. That’s pretty damn recent, and it’s done by Masangsoft as well, the team re-releasing RaiderZ. The game was originally released back in March 2012 and had over 50,000 concurrent players at its peak. That’s pretty huge!
700 is.. kinda disheartening to see then since that’s a fraction of its former glory, but oh well!

So the game has 5 races: Human, Elf, Gray Elf, Lycan, and the Diel. Unfortunately each race is actually gender locked. Instead of gender-locking classes, we have gender-locked races. Yup, races.
There are currently 4 classes in-game, the Paladin, Sorceress, Shadowmage and Warrior, with the Archer supposedly coming in the future sometime. Each race has a selection of classes made available to them, such as the Elf being the only race that can be a Sorceress.
This makes it difficult to play the race you want because let’s be real here.. my wife wanted to play the mage class of the game and was limited to only Elf. Yup, so that sucked.
Character creation though wasn’t half bad. You’re given a couple pre-determined faces, hairstyles, makeup options and facial accessories, but that’s about it.
While you’re very limited in what you can create, each race has their own unique options to choose between, and the characters actually look pretty good!
But holy shit make-up irked me. The facial accessories.. they moved whenever she blinked which made her look.. ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. I couldn’t deal with that so I went accessory-less.

Then I begun my journey in the world of DK Online.. Or, I thought I was about to. My game crashed after selecting my character, which was great fun.

So, I booted it back up and jumped straight back in ’cause you know what? I’m not gonna let that stop me from playing the game!
But.. nope. Crashed again.

Apparently, to play DK Online you’re required to disable your antivirus or add it as an exception, allowing the game through your antivirus protection.

The combat, which I’m sure you’re all curious of is tab-target. No action combat here, nope! The combat is actually a little rough as well, and honestly the skill system really just.. confuses me a little bit.
Like, I’m aware you can learn skills but after hours of playing, I’d learned.. 1? I think it was 1. And the game didn’t go about explaining how to learn more.
But that’s just me. My wife who played sorcerer had learned 1 or 2 though they were learned via scrolls.. which I never obtained any of. So. Iunno.

The cash shop, though, holy fuck me sideways. The Blessed DK Special Package is 70 DOLLARS. And all it does is give you, in essence, what most free to play MMOs would refer to as a “VIP membership” that lasts 30 days.
THIRTY DAYS. You have to pay $70 EVERY THIRTY DAYS to retain your VIP membership. To put this into perspective, Blade & Soul, TERA, Black Desert, Elder Scrolls Online.. so many MMORPGs have VIP memberships for around $15 per month.
So SEVENTY? Are you kidding me? What the fuck were these guys smoking and has anyone actually paid for that? ’cause the thought that people would is inane.
But I mean it’s your money, so if you wanna spend it, go right ahead. I just think it’s discouraging to know that they gate things like that behind such a large pay-wall.

Unfortunately nobody I met while running around was uh.. sociable. Or spoke English.
That was a pretty sizeable issue as well. So many Korean’s in the game – and while I have no issue with them personally, when the majority of players are Korean.. why are we playing again?
I don’t speak Korean so the language barrier was a huge issue.

The town is very alive with players. From what I could tell, the vast majority of them crowded around whatever the first town was called. New players were spawning in every other minute and.. honestly, that’s refreshing to see.

Questing seemed about what you’d expect from the game..
Well, at least for the first hour or two. After that, there was a drastic change in how long quests took as we jumped from requiring 5-10 monsters killed per quest or 3-5 items looted to 30-50 monsters killed and 30 items looted with less than a 50% drop rate..
So you can imagine how old that gets. Real fast. Judging by that, at only level 12, it’s safe to assume that the game is a Korean grinder, requiring you grind more than quest.
Which is fine – I mean there’s a niche for that, but I’ve always hated grinding the same monsters over and over, and when wandering around.. I came to the realization that everyone I saw was grinding as opposed to questing.

And while they were more than willing to party up to make things easier, after we finally completed our objectives, we’d leave and most of them would remain, continuing to grind pretty much.. indefinitely.
We partied with someone in the same area as us when we were level 13 and they were level 18. Which is insane because you get like.. 10% XP per quest completion, and 1% XP every 3 kills.

Overall, I can say.. the game is definitely not for me.
I can’t comment on whether it’s pay to win or not at this point, but that huge $70 per month investment is just.. a huge nope for me. That’s a red flag if I ever saw one.
The combat is very unrefined, especially with it releasing in 2012.
Graphically.. I mean the character models look alright, nothing compared to MMORPGs like TERA or Blade & Soul which launched in 2011 and 2012 respectively.
Ultimately, the grind turned me off, lack of explanation of in-game mechanics made it more difficult than it should’ve been, and the large majority of the playerbase being Korean really made it hard to communicate with anyone.
This is one of the few MMORPGs I would not recommend to someone looking to play something new. It looks old, it feels old, and grinding is a chore.
But hey, at the very least it’s got a more active population than Bless Online. Well, for a couple weeks, anyway.